Fine line black tattoo of a single poppy on a stem with two leaves, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Small poppy on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black fine line tattoo of a single poppy-like flower on a thin stem with two leaves, positioned on the inner forearm near the wrist. The linework is delicate and even, with minimal shading and the petals drawn as open outlines. The background is a plain pale wall, and the wearer's hand, a beaded bracelet and a patterned, colourful top are visible beside the arm.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Flower Poppy Stem Leaves Bracelet

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August the Bramleys at Hollins Farm have gone heavy and the wasps have found the windfalls, and you are still walking the headland with a bucket that never seems to fill. Tom Pargeter reckons the field poppies will be out along the hedge before the last pickers go home, and he is right. They came up overnight in the stubble, thin-stemmed and loud red, as if someone had dropped a box of matches in the grass.

Keep reading

You take one, a single bloom on a stalk no thicker than string, and you slide it between the pages of the ledger where Tom keeps his pickers' hours. He catches you at it. He does not tell you off. He taps the page with a blunt pencil and says that poppy will be dropping its petals by Thursday, and that is the whole trick of them, they never wait for you to finish looking.

He tells you about his wife, Ruth, who wore one behind her ear every picking day for thirty-one years, and who would not let him pick them for the house because they would be dead before they reached the table. You think about that on the drive back down the lane, the dust settling on the hedges behind the van.

In April you open the ledger to find the hours for the spring pruning. The poppy has pressed flat and gone the colour of old brick, but the stem still holds two small leaves, curled and stubborn, and the paper has taken the shape of the petals so cleanly that you can see where each one opened. You leave it where it lies.