Red poppy tattoo with a black outline, soft watercolour-style shading and a long black stem running down the centre of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red poppy with black stem on the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bright red poppy sits between the shoulder blades, outlined in black with a loose red splatter spreading to its right. A thin black stem runs straight down the spine from the base of the flower. The soft, painterly shading in red contrasts with the crisp black outline, and the tattoo is centred on a plain, dark background.

Botanical Back Poppy Flower Stem Splatter

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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

The last tent came down on a wet Tuesday, the canvas folded badly while Mr Pell counted takings in the cab of his lorry. Ada stayed behind in the wardrobe wagon, unpicking sequins from a costume nobody would wear again. Her fingers were stiff with cold and the thread kept snarling, so when she found the tin at the bottom of the trunk she was glad of something to look at other than the rain.

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Inside were three tubes of vermilion gone hard as sweets, and a brush with the bristles splayed flat. Her father had painted the poppy on the entrance flap the summer she turned nine, standing on an upturned crate with his tongue between his teeth. He had loaded the brush too full, and where the stem began to run he let it drip, so the black line slid all the way down the cloth to the hem. Pell had called it a mistake. Her father had called it the flower's way of getting home.

Pell wanted the flap for the auction in the morning, with the poppy facing out for the buyers. Ada asked him for one night. She sat under the bare bulb with a needle and a reel of black cotton and went over the stem stitch by stitch, then scattered scraps of red silk across the corner where the splatter had always been, until the old paint and the new thread looked like one hand had made them.

The auctioneer held the flap up to the light the next afternoon and ran his thumb along the seam. He read the bid card twice, then folded the canvas over his arm, flower inwards, the black line falling from the top edge to the ground where it had always meant to go.