Colour tattoo of black-eyed Susan flowers and a central flower filled with the Maryland flag pattern, botanical style, on a person's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black-eyed Susans and Maryland flag on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several yellow black-eyed Susan flowers with brown centres arranged around a larger central flower. The central bloom is filled with the black and yellow diamond pattern and red cross motifs of the Maryland flag, with a grey centre. Shading is soft and the outlines are clean, and the design sits across the shoulder and top of the upper arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Daisy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed tin is the last thing you find under the potting bench in February, rust blooming at the hinge, and you thumb it open the way your father used to, slowly, as if the seeds might object. Inside are dry black-eyed Susan heads, their centres gone to coal, and they rattle when you tip them onto the bench. Outside, sleet has settled on the marsh road and the barn door sags on its one good hinge.

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Your neighbour Dolores Pruitt drives up in a truck that has seen more winters than the barn. She wants to know whether you're selling the east field to the developers from Easton. You tell her no, not yet, and she nods at the tin as if it were a verdict. "Those were your mother's," she says. "She saved them in the same tin, I expect. Every October she walked the fence line with a bread bag over her wrist."

You take the tin to the kitchen table and sort the seeds onto a square of newspaper, counting them the way she taught you, flicking out the chaff with a butter knife. Forty-one good ones. You think about the field in July, the yellow flowers bowing toward the road, the dark eyes at their centres, and how your mother used to say they were the only thing on the farm that never needed asking twice.

By dusk you have them in an envelope marked in capitals, and you walk out with a trowel to the bare patch by the gate. The ground is too hard. You kneel anyway, press three seeds into the frozen soil, pat it flat, and leave the envelope tucked under the mailbox flag for spring.