Fine line tattoo of a red watercolour-style poppy at the top of a woman's back, with a thin stem and cursive script running down the spine.

Red poppy with script down the spine

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A red poppy with soft, blended petals sits at the top of the spine, joined to a long, thin black stem. Along the stem runs a line of fine cursive script, which is too small and stylised to read clearly. The left photo shows the whole back with the subject's hair tied up in a headscarf, and the right photo is a close-up of the flower and script on bare skin.

Fine line Botanical Back Poppy Flower Stem Script Lettering

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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

Dear Ida, the poppy came up through the cracked step again this morning, a single red cup on a stalk as thin as a bootlace, and I stood over it with the trowel in my hand like a fool. Mum's writing is still on the wall where she pinned the seed packet, and I have been copying her loops onto the back of an envelope all week so I don't forget how the words run. You always said she wrote like a spider had dipped its feet in ink.

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The letter from the estate agents came on Tuesday. The house is to be sold by the autumn, and the man wants the garden cleared before the photographs. I told him there was nothing to clear but the stones and the rosemary, and he laughed and said that was exactly what they would clear. I have not mentioned the poppies. There are only three left now, out of the dozens she sowed along the fence, and I think they keep seeding themselves out of spite.

Yesterday I climbed the stepladder and copied the line from the back fence, the one where she wrote out the Latin name and then a sentence I could never quite read. Standing there in my socks, I finally made it out. It said, keep whatever comes up through you. I laughed at that, a little too loudly, because it sounded like something she would have scribbled on a shopping list. Then I cut the stem as close to the root as I could, pressed the head flat inside the atlas, and I am sending it to you in this envelope so the sea air does not get at it first.

Write back soon and tell me if it still smells of her.