Full back tattoo of a shaded grey skull with red poppies, a helicopter and a line of black lettering, with painterly black and red splashes.

Skull and poppies across a full back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large grey-shaded skull fills the centre of a back, with a line of black lettering above it reading 'What I have in my heart, I'll take to my grave'. Red poppies and a dark helicopter sit around the upper and right sides, alongside loose black and red brush-like splashes. The image is mostly red and black ink on grey, with smooth shading on the skull and looser, painterly edges on the surrounding elements.

Realism Back Skull Poppy Lettering Quote Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The field behind Hollin Farm went red every June, the poppies pushing up through the flattened barley where the big green machine had come down the summer before. Nobody in the village asked Eli Carrick why he walked out there each year with his bootlaces undone. They knew the answer, and his mother had stopped asking it in 1971.

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The letter had come in a brown envelope with a ministry stamp, two lines long, and she had read it standing at the sink with her hands still wet. Eli found it again in the tin of Mint Imperials under the stairs, folded soft as cloth, a pressed poppy stuck to the back where the crease had worn through. Under the printed lines he had written in pencil, the night before the flight, a scrap of verse copied off a Sunday school card. He had thought it funny then, a bit of daft sentiment to make Pauline laugh when he got home. What I have in my heart, I'll take to my grave. Reading it now, it sounded like a promise he had made to himself and never meant to keep.

He lay down in the grass with the dew soaking through his trousers and listened to the rooks argue over the church tower. A helicopter crossed the far ridge, low and slow, on its way to somewhere with a hospital. He watched it until the sound thinned to nothing, then turned his head and found a poppy close enough to touch, its petals thin as tissue paper and black at the heart.

He pressed the flower back into the letter, tucked the tin under his arm, and walked home through the gate with the wet grass whispering at his ankles. The field would be red again next June, whether anyone walked out to see it or not.