Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tied wildflower bouquet, with poppies, daisy-like blooms and seed pods, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wildflower bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of wildflowers tied with a band at the stem, including two open poppies, a daisy-like bloom, spiked lavender-style sprigs, a dandelion-like flower and poppy seed pods. The design uses fine black outlines with stippled and shaded petals, and the loose, trailing stems fan out toward the bottom of the arm. The image is in black and grey against a plain white wall, with a striped top visible at the left edge.

Botanical Forearm Bouquet Wildflower Poppy Seed pod Daisy Lavender Dandelion Flower Stem Ribbon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You stop the van on the gravel shoulder of the Cutter Pass road because the desert has done the thing it does once every few years. Rain fell on the Tinder Flats three nights ago, and now the poppies are open in their hundreds, orange and white in the ruts the grader left behind. Your father's note is still folded in the glovebox: meet the Hallam boys at the cattle grid by noon, and don't pick anything, they'll want to see it standing.

Keep reading

You pick anything. You walk out until the road is a grey thread behind you, and you gather what the ground gives: two poppies with their papery sleeves still closed, a spike of purple lavender gone pale at the tip, a dandelion turned to fluff, a daisy with its petals nibbled by something small. Each seed pod you snap off goes into your shirt pocket, rattling like dice. The stems you tie with a strip torn from the hem of your sleeve, because the twine is in the van and you won't walk back for it.

At the cattle grid the Hallam boys are waiting in a truck with the engine running. Ray leans out and looks at the bundle in your hand, then at your face. "Those'll be dead by tonight," he says. "Everything out here is dead by tonight." You hold the flowers out anyway. He takes them and turns them over, and for a while none of you says anything, the wind pushing the open poppies so their petals shiver against the tailgate.

He drops them on the dash and waves you through. You drive back the long way, and when you glance across at the seat, the poppies have begun to fold their petals inward, the way they do when the light goes. The pods stay in your pocket all the way to the coast, rattling every time you brake.