Watercolour-style pink and purple poppies with black grass stems running across a woman's upper and mid back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour poppies across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows loose pink, red and purple poppy heads with soft washed edges, set among thin black grass stems that sweep up and down the back. The shading is built from translucent colour washes and splatter-like marks rather than hard outlines. The design follows the spine and fills most of the back, with a small line of faint text near the lower edge and bra straps visible at the sides.

Botanical Back Poppy Flower Petal Grass Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed packets came up in the lift with Maureen's shopping every Thursday, and she always pressed one into my hand before I could tell her I had no ground to sow it in. Corn poppy, it said on the front, in a typeface that had given up on being cheerful. Nobody on the fourteenth floor had a garden. We had a concrete ledge, a view of the bypass and a pigeon called Gordon who sat on the railing as if he held the deeds.

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So in March I tipped the lot over the edge of the balcony, feeling foolish, and watched the wind carry most of it off across the car park. I thought that was the end of it. Then in June the verge by the bin store turned red, a bruised colour that looked like it had been rained on and left to run. Lads from the flats next door stood smoking under it and didn't know what to make of it. Maureen came down in her slippers with a flask and said it was the most sensible thing anyone had done on that estate since the lift was fixed.

I went down to look properly. The stems were thin and black-green, and the heads hung loose, petals so thin the light came through them, as if someone had painted each one with a brush full of water and didn't mind the drips. Purple had bled into the gutter where the seed had gone over. Gordon had a go at one and lost interest.

That evening the wind came round off the bypass and the whole verge leaned one way at once, all those red heads bowing like a crowd that had just heard news. I stood on the ledge with my tea going cold and thought about the packet I'd thrown, and how little of it had needed me to keep it.