Colour tattoo of three red poppies with dark stems on the calf, in a painterly botanical style.

Three red poppies on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three poppies in shades of red and orange, with the largest flower at the top and two smaller blooms trailing below it. The petals have soft gradients and fine veining, while the dark stems and centres are drawn with bold black linework. The design sits on the calf against a softly blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies came up along the towpath the spring after the dredgers went through, as if the silt had been holding them under and finally let go. I saw them first from the roof of the Marigold, a narrowboat with a cracked stove and a name I never liked, and I kept quiet about them to Tom at the lock, because I knew he would have had the strimmer out by noon.

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There were three at the bend below Hythe Bridge. The big one stood at the top like a woman in a good coat, and the two smaller ones trailed after it, heads bowed as if they had lost the thread of the walk. Their stems rose out of the verge black as the tar on the gates, and their petals were the colour of a stove element just switched on in a dark kitchen, orange at the edges, deeper red where the light gave up.

In June the engine seized a hundred yards short of the bridge and I drifted into the reeds with no way to hold her. I had no signal and no pole long enough. So I climbed down onto the bank, cut the largest bloom with its stem still attached, and tied it to the bow rail with a length of blue string. Two hours later a hire boat came round the bend, saw the red and slowed, and a girl with a windlass threw me a rope.

I kept the stem in a jam jar on the table. By August the petals had dropped in a neat ring on the wood, and one morning I opened the hatch and tipped them out. The breeze caught them off the roof and carried them over the water, one after another, down towards the sea, every one of them still red.

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