Colour tattoo of red poppies and buds in a watercolour style with ink splatters, running up the side of the ribs.

Watercolour poppies on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several red and orange poppy flowers on loose stems, with green buds and drips of black ink. The petals are rendered with soft blended shading and paint-like edges rather than hard outlines. Vivid red and orange ink dominates the composition, which rises diagonally across the side of the torso.

Botanical Ribs Poppy Flower Bud Stem Ink splatter Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jar of rinse water went over at a quarter past four, and Nell Harrow watched the grey-brown stream run across the oilcloth towards the poppy study she had been working on since lunch. She lunged for the paper, but the edge was already soaked, and the red she had laid down an hour earlier began to bloom into the wet fibre the way it always did when she was too tired to wait for it to dry.

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Her sister-in-law Ruth came in from the lane with a basket of eggs and found her sitting on the step with the spoiled sheet across her knees. "That's ruined," Ruth said, peering over her shoulder. Nell shook her head. The wet red had pulled into the paper in long runs, and where the black she had flicked from the brush had landed, it had stretched into thin lines that ran down from the petals like rain down a windowpane.

Nell had painted poppies for thirty years for the seed catalogue in Holt, and nobody had ever asked her to make them look tidy. The old printer used to say the splashes were the best part, because they reminded people that flowers were wet things that wanted to run away from you. She turned the sheet to the light. Three open heads, one fat bud, and the stems dragging towards the bottom edge as if they were trying to reach the floor.

She took a fresh sheet, dipped her smallest brush, and started a stem at the top of the page, letting the water carry the colour down and out of her hands. Ruth set the eggs on the table and said nothing. By supper there were eleven poppies drying on the dresser, each dripping a little differently, and the spoiled one was pinned above the stove where the lamplight caught its black threads.