Poppy Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a poppy tattoo means

Two readings run through the poppy, one ancient and one a little over a century old. The first is sleep. The opium poppy is Papaver somniferum, the sleep-bringing poppy, and it gave the Greeks and Romans their picture of rest: Ovid put poppies at the mouth of the cave where the god of sleep lies, and morphine was later named after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Sleep and death were twin brothers in Greek myth, so the flower passed easily from one to the other.

The second is the war dead, and it belongs to the corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas. Its seed can lie in the soil for years and germinates when the ground is turned over, so the shelled fields of Flanders flowered red through the fighting. John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, wrote In Flanders Fields there in May 1915, and the red poppy is still worn across the Commonwealth for Remembrance Day on 11 November, and in New Zealand around Anzac Day in April.

Colour moves it again. The white poppy, first sold by the Co-operative Women's Guild in 1933, remembers the dead of every side and asks for peace. The orange California poppy is a different plant with no war in it: the state flower of California since 1903, it closes at night and on grey days, so the three here, washed in orange, read as sunshine rather than mourning.

The other designs lean on those meanings. Poppies growing through the face of an empty Corinthian helmet are a soldier remembered; the wreath in the hair of an angel of death is the old pairing of sleep and dying; the bloom whose centre opens into a night sky is the poppy of sleep; poppies braided with wheat round the Taurus stars echo Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, who is often shown holding both. A seed head alone, its last petal falling, is the flower after its season.

Where the design comes from

The remembrance poppy was a campaign before it was a symbol. Moina Michael, an American teacher, read McCrae's poem in 1918 and vowed to wear a red poppy; Anna Guérin of France organised the first poppy days, and the British Legion held its first Poppy Appeal on 11 November 1921. The Legion's English factory made poppies with two petals and a leaf, and in 1926 Lady Haig opened one in Edinburgh whose poppies have four petals and no leaf, the shape of the flat poppy on this page.

Choosing yours

• Keep the centre dark and large. A poppy is identified less by its thin, crumpled petals than by the black button and ring of stamens in the middle; drawn small and pale, it becomes any red flower.
• Decide which poppy you mean: the scarlet corn poppy with its black heart, the orange, cup-shaped California poppy, or the larger opium poppy. The dotwork pod here is a seed head, a ribbed capsule under a fluted crown that sheds seed through a ring of pores like a pepper pot, which every true poppy has.
• Red is the pigment most often behind allergic reactions to tattoo ink, so ask for a patch test if you have reacted to it before.

Common questions