Red poppy tattoo with soft painterly shading and a green stem and bud on the inner forearm, in a botanical style.

Red poppy with stem on the forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red poppy bloom with a dark centre and yellow-green stamens sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with a thin green stem and closed bud extending down the arm. The petals use soft, blended shading and gradients of red that give a watercolour-like effect, with a few loose drips at the lower edge. The composition is angled across the arm, and the bud and stem add a second point of colour against the skin.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Stem Bud Leaf Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, it talks back, and sit where the damp can't reach your knees. Mrs Penhallow kept the Gull House at Porthenna for forty years and never let a guest leave without a story, even the ones who paid by the week and wanted nothing but their breakfast. This one is about the painter who came in April with red on his cuffs and a tin of colour he would not let the maid touch.

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His name was Aldous Vine, and he took the attic room that looked out over the cliff path. Each morning he walked up to the headland where the wild poppies grew between the gorse, and each evening he came back with his fingers stained to the knuckle and the hem of his coat wet through. He said the colour would not sit still on paper. It wanted to run, so he worked with water and let the red bleed wherever it pleased.

Nell, the landlady's girl, found his sketchbook under the bed in May. Every page held the same flower, first opening wide, then closing down into a bud on a thin green stem, and beside each bud was a small dark smudge like a thumbprint. She asked him what the smudges were. He told her they were where the flower had kissed the paper and held on, and that a poppy never lets go of anything it has touched. She thought this was nonsense and said so, and he laughed for the first time all spring.

He left without a word the morning after the June gales. Nell climbed up at first light and found the window open, the room smelling of linseed and salt, and on the sill a jam jar holding a single poppy, its petals beginning to brown at the edges. A drop of red had run down the glass and dried on the wood. She kept the jar. Mrs Penhallow still keeps it on the dresser in the back kitchen, and if you look closely in the morning light, the water inside is pink.