Red poppy tattoo with a dark centre and green pistil on a forearm, surrounded by orange and red autumn leaves on a tiled floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppy tattoo on a forearm among autumn leaves

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red poppy with soft petal shading and a dark centre with a green pistil sits on the inner forearm. Autumn leaves in orange, red and burgundy are scattered over the arm and the cream tiled surface beneath it. The flower fills the centre of the frame, with the leaves framing it from the edges.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Leaves Autumn leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

3 October, 03:40. The automatic doors at the ambulance bay have been sticking since the wind changed, so every few minutes a gust comes down the corridor carrying leaves: sycamore, and something with a burnt-orange edge I can't name. Pearl on Ward 9 says the cleaners sweep them up at six and they'll be back by eight. I have started counting them on the lino like a superstition.

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Around two, a porter called Dev brought up a paper cup from the vending machine and set it on my desk without a word. Someone had drawn a poppy on it in biro, a fat red circle with a black middle, and I laughed for the first time since handover. He said his nan made paper ones every November from the wool shop's offcuts, and he wanted to know whether a hospital would let a real one stand on the nurses' station in a jam jar. I said it would have to be plastic. He said that was fair.

At four the bell for bed nine went off and I ran. When I came back the cup had gone, and in its place was a leaf, orange and veined like a map, pressed flat under the stapler. I did not move it. Dev is off tomorrow. Pearl says the leaves always come back in October, that the building breathes them in from the car park trees, and she gives up sweeping by six.

I will leave the leaf where it is until the end of my shift, then take it home and press it inside the book I never finish. Pearl says the doors will be fixed by Friday. I doubt she has said it to the doors.