Watercolour-style tattoo of a swallow in flight with red poppies and black birds across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow and red poppies across the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey swallow in flight sits over a vertical column of red poppies, with a few small black birds in the upper left. The bird is shaded in greys with soft detail, while the poppies use red wash and darker tonal accents. Loose black splashes and brush-like strokes run through the composition, leaving open skin between the elements.

Botanical Back Swallow Bird Poppy Flower Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the barrow, for the sun has been at those poppies since six and they are full of themselves this morning. You want to hear about the swallow. Well, pull up the upturned bucket. Every April that bird came up the lane from the river, low over the hedges, and every April it went straight into the potting shed as if it held the deeds.

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Old Tom Hallam kept that shed, and he kept the poppy wall beside it, red as a pillar box, sown by his wife Edie the autumn before she died. He never sowed another. He let the bird have the rafters and the poppies have the sun, and between the two of them he got on with being miserable in the proper way, which is quietly and with a flask.

The year the swallow stayed late, the August was dry as a bone. Ferris from next door, a boy with more elbows than sense, wanted to pick the best bloom for his mother's hat. Tom told him to take the seedheads instead and give them a good shake. One evening the telegraph wires filled with swallows, hundreds of them, gathering for the long road south, and the old bird dropped out of the sky and settled on the top flower, quite still, as if it wanted one last good look at the garden.

Next morning the wires were bare and the poppies were bent and papery. Tom sat on his bucket and tipped the dry pods into a biscuit tin. He gave it a shake, and the seeds ran through it like rain on a tin roof. 'Hear that?' he said. 'That's next spring, coming back up the lane.'