Black ink line drawing of two open poppies and a poppy seed pod on a stem, shown as a botanical tattoo design on white paper with no body placement visible.

Two poppies and a seed pod in pen and ink

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two open poppy flowers, one at the top and one in the middle, with a closed seed pod and buds at the base of a thin, curving stem. The linework is fine and hatched, with dense shading in the petal folds and the stamen centres, and light, open areas on the petals. The image is black ink on a plain white background, with the subject filling a tall, narrow composition.

Botanical Poppy Flower Seed pod Stem Bud Petal Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ceri had been told the keep would be fenced by Michaelmas, so she had three weeks to measure what was left of it. The surveyor, a man called Harold Pryce who ate boiled eggs out of a tin, gave her a tape, a clipboard and a list of walls that were not to be touched. Nobody had listed the poppies. They came up through the mortar of the east curtain wall in a scatter of red, thin-stemmed and impatient, as if the stone had been built around them rather than over them.

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She drew them anyway. In the evenings at the inn in Llanfair she sat with a fineliner and tried to get the petals right, the way they folded like wet paper and dropped their dark centres into shadow. The stamens were the hard part. Each one ended in a small knob that Harold said was called a stigma, and she had to shade it so it caught the light. The seed pods she drew last, squat and ridged like upturned pepper pots, and they reminded her of nothing so much as the lids of old salt cellars in her grandmother's kitchen.

On the last morning the pods had split. Dry seeds lay in the grass like grit. Ceri knelt at the foot of the wall, picked the ripest pod, shook it, and watched the seeds scatter across the flagstones. Harold came round the corner with his tape and his tin, saw her on her knees, and said nothing for a while.

"They'll only come back in the wrong place," he said eventually. She tipped the rest into her palm and pushed them into a crack between two blocks, pressing with her thumb. "Then they'll have to be somewhere," she said, and wrote the measurement down anyway.