Colour realism-style tattoo of a vintage poppy bouquet with red, pink and cream blooms and green leaves across a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage poppy bouquet on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of poppies in red, pink and cream, with several buds and dark green leaves trailing down the arm. The flowers have soft, shaded petals and a painterly, vintage botanical quality. Colour dominates the composition against the pale skin, with a lace top visible at the right edge of the frame.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Shoulder Poppy Flower Bud Leaf Floral Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies had come aboard in a tin lined with waxed paper, and by the third day out of Gravesend the paper was freckled with petal dust and the galley smelt of them, sweetish and green. Cook Haskell wanted them thrown over the side before they spoiled the stores. I told him they were a seed merchant's samples bound for a nursery in Valparaiso, which was true, though I did not mention the sketchbook already open beside the flour bin.

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I painted at the scrubbed end of the table after the supper dishes, using a box of watercolours that had belonged to my mother and a brush worn down to three hairs. The old botanical plates in the chart room had taught me how the petals should lean and how the light should fall from the left, like a lamp swung by a steward. Every night the ship rolled and the water jar slopped, and every night the pink blooms came out a shade too grey, the cream ones a shade too yellow.

On the ninth night Haskell came in off the watch, stood behind me with his tea going cold, and said the cream ones were the truest. He said nothing else. The next morning a single poppy head hung drying from the rail above the stove, tied with a twist of twine, and beneath it was a scrap of paper in his square hand: for the ledger, not the sea.

We reached Valparaiso in April. The seed merchant counted his crates twice and found the tin still sealed, the stems inside it sleeping. I kept the sketchbook, and the poppy head I pressed flat between its pages, where it has gone the colour of weak tea and still smells, faintly, of the galley.