Colour tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm showing a sunset sky, bare black-lined trees, red poppies and small birds in flight.

Sunset tree and poppies on shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with a sunset sky in orange, yellow, red and soft teal. Fine black linework draws bare trees, with three red poppies and scattered red seeds or petals near the base, and a line of small birds crosses towards the upper back. The shading is soft and blended behind the linework, and the composition wraps around the curve of the shoulder.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Sunset Sky Cloud Tree Poppy Bird Swirl Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread van was late again, so I was standing at the back door with the kettle in one hand when Mr Penhallow came down the stairs with his paint box and asked me to hold the light. He meant the sunset. He had been chasing the right orange since Whitsun, and every evening the sky over the gasworks came out a shade too pink, like a cheap boiled sweet.

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He paid his rent partly in watercolours, which I hung in the front parlour between the barometer and the stuffed gull. Most were of the elm behind the Bell, the one the storm had split, its branches bare as knitting needles against the light. Every sheet had a poppy or two at the foot of the trunk, because the railway cutting was thick with them that summer, and he said they were the only things in Saltcombe that didn't apologise for themselves.

He died in October with a sheet still pinned to the easel in the back bedroom. The sky on it was nearly right. I could see where he had meant to lay the yellow over the red and let it bleed, and I could see he had run out of nerve, or light, or both. I didn't finish it. I didn't know how.

Now the starlings still come in over the pier in their loose black ropes, and at about six the whole sky goes the colour he never managed. I stand at the door with the kettle going cold in my hand and let it be exactly what it is.