Colour tattoo of three red poppies with dark stems and a closed bud on the side of a thigh, in a realistic botanical style.

Three red poppies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Three red poppies sit on dark curved stems, with one closed bud at the top left and a few sweeping black lines around them. The petals are shaded with darker reds and dark centres, giving them depth against the skin. The warm, dimly lit photograph is framed closely so the flowers fill most of the image.

Botanical Realism Thigh Poppy Flower Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dried seed heads rattled in the tin long before I understood what they were for. My father kept them on the windowsill above the sink, next to a ball of brown string he would never throw away, and every August he tipped a pinch over the back step like salt. "Poppies don't want a fuss," he said. "Scatter them where the ground's been turned and walk off."

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I inherited the shop the spring he died, along with the tin, the brass scales and a ledger full of names, most of them gone. Then in June a woman came in holding a photograph of a field, its corners soft from handling, and asked whether we still stocked poppy seed. I had to dig the packets out from under the bird food. She didn't want a packet. She wanted a handful, loose, in a twist of newspaper, and she asked me how much to sow on a bank of clay.

I showed her the way he had shown me, rubbing the seed fine between finger and thumb so the dust caught the light. She said the field in the photograph had belonged to her uncle, who levelled it in a hurry one autumn and never sowed anything there again. For forty years nothing grew but thistles and couch grass. Then, the first summer after the diggers left, the poppies came up all at once, as if they had been waiting underneath the whole time.

I walked her to the door and stood on the step with the tin under my arm. The paving was warm, and behind the bins a few stubborn stems had already split open, red as a struck match. When she had gone I tipped the last of my father's seed over the step and onto the bare patch where the old wall had been, then went inside to answer the bell, which was somebody wanting carrot seed.