Back tattoo of black and grey wildflowers in front of an orange watercolour-style sun, with fine radiating lines, small birds and a script banner across the upper back and shoulder.

Wildflowers and orange sun across the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of wildflowers, possibly poppies, in black linework with grey shading, rising up the back toward the shoulder blade. Loose orange wash strokes form a sun-like halo behind the stems, with fine radiating dotted lines and small black birds in flight around them. A scroll banner across the lower part of the design carries a line of script that is only partly legible.

Botanical Back Shoulder Flower Poppy Bird Sun Ray Banner Script Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats are already past the breakwater when you climb the shingle with the flask under your arm, and the sky over Pell Head is the colour of a struck match. Your father always said the orange came up before the gulls did, and he was right more often than the wireless. Poppies have seeded themselves along the sea wall again, blown in from the field behind the fish market, their red gone papery and fierce in the wind.

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Mags Tolley is waiting by the winch with her oilskins zipped to the chin. She doesn't say good morning. She tips her head at the black shapes dropping over the water, a dozen birds folding towards the Maren Rose, and says the shoal has come in close overnight. You have heard that from her before and been wrong. This time the gannets are diving in a straight line, and you tell her to get the nets.

Out on the grey water the swell is long and patient. Your hands know the warp without you watching them. When the net comes up heavy and silver, Mags laughs for the first time in a week, and you see she has been carrying a folded square of paper in her breast pocket, its corners soft from handling. It is the list of names from the Kittiwake bank, the winter the three boats went down. She has been waiting for a morning calm enough to put it back in the tin.

On the way in you pass the headland, and the poppies are blazing on the wall in the low sun. You cut the engine and let the boat drift. Above the harbour the orange haze keeps climbing, and the words your father chalked on the board by the slipway come back to you, half rubbed away by the spray: to resist despair. You pick up the stern line and throw it.