Colour realism tattoo of a red poppy with a green stem and bud on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppy tattoo on a wrist and forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red poppy with soft, painterly petals and a dark centre with yellow stamens fills the inner wrist, with a thin green stem and bud running down the forearm. The shading blends from deep crimson to bright red, giving the petals a watercolour-like translucency. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph against a plain fabric background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Stem Bud Petal

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and keep your boots off the sprung floor till the band's tuned. This is the one about the poppy that wouldn't stay pinned at the Winter Garden, above the wool shop in Thornley Cross, the spring after the war.

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Jack Mellor ran the Saturday dances with a tenor sax and one good eye, and every week a girl called Edie Crane came up the stairs with a paper poppy from the Legion tin. She pinned it to her dark coat, never her frock, because her mother said a poppy wants a dark ground to show against. She hung the coat on the hook by the door and kept the poppy on, a small red thing among the dance-card pencils.

One April night the paper had gone soft at the edges. Edie had dipped it in her father's madder dye to make it brighter, and by nine o'clock the red had bled down onto her collar and into the cloth of her good blouse. She was mortified and tried to stand by the cloakroom so nobody would see. Jack walked over between numbers with his sax slung on its strap and said the bleed looked like a sunset getting ideas above its station. She laughed so hard she had to sit on the radiator.

The next Saturday there was a poppy waiting on the hook. Jack had painted it on a scrap of thin card, the petals washed in crimson and the centre dabbed black, with a yellow fleck for the stamens and a green stalk running down the side to a bud no bigger than a barley grain. It wasn't pinned to anything. He'd left it lying on the coat, and Edie said afterwards that he'd done it so she'd have to look at it before she left. She did, and that was the whole of the courting, as far as I've ever been told.