Black ink drawing of a symmetrical pair of poppies with geometric diamond shapes on a tan background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Symmetrical poppies with geometric diamonds

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two poppy flowers facing outward from a central stem, with broad curled leaves below them. A stacked geometric diamond shape runs down the centre, with two smaller diamonds above and below. The linework is fine and black, with stippled dotwork and hatching in the flower centres and leaves, and the design is set on a plain tan background.

Botanical Geometric Poppy Flower Leaves Diamond Geometric shape Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed tins are where your grandmother left them, under the feed sacks at the back of the cold barn, and the frost has swollen the door so you have to lift it before it will open. Inside, the light comes grey through the slats. You find the one she always called the twins, its lid taped with a strip of masking tape gone yellow at the edges. The seeds inside are tiny and dark, like grains of pepper, and they rattle when you tip the tin towards the window.

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She grew poppies from a single root, she used to say, and they came up as two heads on one stem, turned outward like a pair of gate hinges. Every summer she cut them with a knife she kept for nothing else, and every winter she sat at the kitchen table with the glass diamond from the chalk pit, the one the plough turned up before you were born. She held it to the lamp and said it was the keel of the whole farm, the part that kept everything from tipping over. You never understood her. You only remember the way the light broke into little triangles across the oilcloth.

Under the lid is a folded slip of paper in her looping hand. It says: Sow both heads, same day, one for each side of the lane. You read it twice before you understand. Across the lane is the cottage where her sister lived until the argument over the boundary hedge, and the other half of the crop has been growing there, unseen, for thirty years.

So you walk it across in the snow, the tin warm in your coat pocket. The ground by the hedge is hard as a plate. You crouch, press a thumb into the frost, and tip the seeds into the small dents you make, one row, then another, until the tin is light and the lane behind you is a row of footprints going the wrong way for home.