Colour tattoo of a red poppy with a green stem and bud on the inner forearm and wrist, painted in a soft watercolour style.

Red poppy with stem on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red poppy bloom sits across the inner wrist, with a green stem running down the forearm to a small bud and thin leaf strokes. The petals are shaded in layers of bright red and deeper crimson, with dark centre details and a green pistil. The soft, blended edges and loose brushstroke-like outlines give a painterly, watercolour look against the pale skin.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Stem Bud Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up in the bottom field on Corran the spring the ferry stopped for a fortnight, and my aunt Morag said that was no coincidence. Poppies only arrive where someone has turned the ground over and been careless about it. She was right about the ground. My father had ploughed it in March, then walked off to Oban with the tractor keys in his coat and never explained himself.

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I took my watercolours out to the field every morning before the wind got up. Morag had taught me to mix the red from madder and a little ochre, not the bought tube, because the tube sits flat on the paper and madder goes soft at the edges, like it's thinking about leaving. The bloom I wanted was the one at the fence, its petals cupped open as if it had just heard its name. I wet the paper, dropped the red in, and let it bleed into the crimson underneath until I couldn't tell which layer was mine.

When the ferry finally limped back in, a woman from the mainland came up the slipway with a sketchbook and a rucksack full of rain. She stopped at the fence, looked at the poppy, then at my wet paper, and asked if the flower was for sale. I said it was already spoken for by the field, and she laughed and bought a jar of my ochre instead.

That evening I painted the last of the stem on the shelter wall by the pier, and the rain came in sideways and softened every edge I'd made. By morning the red had run into the stone and nobody could say where the colour stopped and the wall began. Morag said that was exactly how a good flower should leave a place.