Colour botanical tattoo of poppies, paintbrush-style red flowers and foliage covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Wildflower bouquet on upper arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of wildflowers climbs from the upper arm onto the shoulder, with a tall spray of orange-red blooms at the top. Yellow poppy-like flowers, red tubular blooms, clusters of small pink-red florets and grey-green leaves and stems fill the lower section. The fine outlines are shaded softly with muted greens and grey, and the warm colours stand out against the skin.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Poppy Wildflower Foliage Leaves Stem Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and mind the goat, she has no manners. You want the whole of it or just the poppies? Right. The whole of it, then. Ada Marr came up the Cwm road in the last week of March with a sack of seed on her back and a dog that would not walk to heel. Nobody had seen rain on those slopes since the previous autumn. The stream had gone to stones, and even the sheep looked like they were arguing with the grass.

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Ada did not care about grass. She cared about the orange flowers that grew in the gully behind the old chapel, the ones that flared like a struck match when the sun came over the ridge. Her grandmother had called them paintbrush, because they looked dipped in the pot. Her grandmother had also said you never pick a thing you cannot carry home in one breath, so Ada went carefully, one stem at a time, and tucked each into a folded handkerchief.

By the third day the valley had started to answer her. Yellow cups opened along the wall where no one had planted anything. Little red-pink knots of bloom sat low among the stones, buzzing with bees that had clearly been waiting. The dog lay down in the middle of them and refused to be moved. Ada sat beside him with her knees up and her handkerchief full, and she understood that the valley had never been dead, only waiting for somebody to stop searching so hard for water.

She planted nothing that year. She scattered the seed where she had found it and went home with empty hands and a quieter head. Come back in June if you want to see it properly. The poppies will have blown out by then, but the stems will still be standing, and I am told the bees are very rude about strangers.