Watercolour-style red and pink flower tattoo with long stems and soft splashes across the side of a ribcage, beside the navel.

Red watercolour flowers on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two red and pink flowers sit on the side of the torso, one large and one smaller, with thin green-grey stems running down the skin. The petals are built from soft, blended washes with darker red edges and loose ink splatters, giving a painterly effect. The flowers are in full colour and sit above the hip with the navel visible to the lower right.

Botanical Ribs Flower Poppy Stem Petal Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabin paint had blistered along the roof by the time Dad's old tin of watercolours turned up under the bilge boards, so I took the brushes to the poppies instead. They grew in the spoil heaps along the Coventry Canal, where the navvies had tipped the clay from the new lock, and by June the whole bank looked as if someone had spilt a tray of wine.

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Mum said I was daft to paint flowers on a boat that would be scraped again within the year. I told her the paint was for us, not the next owner. I sat on the gunwale with the tin propped on my knee, wet the brush, and let the first red bleed out across the paper like a dropped handkerchief. Dad always said you had to let the water do half the work. The darker edges came from pressing down and lifting off quickly, and the black-red heart came from flicking a drop of ink off the bristles so it spat across the page.

Mr Okafor, the lock-keeper, walked up from the gates at dusk and stood watching without saying a word. Then he pulled a stem of real poppy from the bank, its petals already coming loose, and laid it across the wet page. The colour ran straight into the wash, so the real flower and the painted one bled together until I could not tell where one stopped. We both looked at it until the light went off the water.

In the morning the petals had dried to a softer pink, and the green stems had crept down the paper the way they do when you press too hard. I did not fix them. I left the stem running off the edge and into the grain of the table, where it still is, and when I moored there again the following spring the poppies on the bank had come back up through the clay as if nothing had been spilt at all.