Flash-style drawing of a skull with pink poppies and teal leaves in bold black linework, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with poppies flash design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A black-lined drawing of a skull with two pink poppies with teal centres tucked against its upper left side, with teal feathery foliage curling around them. The skull has solid black shading on the eye socket and cheek, and its teeth are drawn in fine outline. The design sits on a plain white background, with the pink and teal colour contrasting against the black linework.

Neo-trad Botanical Skull Poppy Flower Leaves Foliage Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Harwood Tower had grown anything in forty years, so when Mr Okafor's seeds came up in the window box outside my kitchen, half the stairwell came up to look. Poppies, he said. They'll come up red if you leave them be. I told him I had never been any good at leaving things be, and he laughed the way he laughed at everything I said, as though I were a radio he'd been given for free.

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The teal feathery stuff came later, uninvited, curling round the drainpipe and through the bars of the railing as if it had been waiting for a gap. The man from the council wrote it down as a weed and went off to his van. Dennis would have liked it. He used to draw skulls in the margins of his notebooks during the night shifts at the bottling plant, grinning ones with flowers pushed into the eye holes, and he said the dead had better manners than the living because they never asked you for anything.

In September the notice went up in the lift, which had never worked anyway. Harwood would come down before Christmas. People started packing. Mr Okafor carried his plants down in a washing basket, one pot at a time, and asked if I was coming. I said I would stay until the last lorry. Then one morning the crane's shadow fell across my kitchen floor, a long black shape with a crooked crown, and I stood in it with my tea going cold.

The two poppies were still there, pink against the grey, their teal centres open like eyes. I cut one and pressed it inside Dennis's notebook, between a grinning skull and a page of his terrible handwriting. The other I left on the sill for whoever came next.