Colour daisy tattoo with grey-shaded white petals, black outline and a yellow centre, placed on the upper back.

Daisy on the upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A single daisy fills the frame, with long white petals shaded in soft grey and outlined in dark linework. The centre is a yellow and orange disc with a small spiral detail. The flower sits on smooth skin with a slight pinkish flush, and the composition is centred and close.

Botanical Back Daisy Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover slides the tin across the steel counter without opening it, then changes her mind and thumbs the lid off. Inside, packed in newspaper from a town you left thirty years ago, are the dried heads of daisies your mother grew along the back fence. "Plant material," she says, not unkindly. "Declare it." You tell her it is only daisies, which is true and not the whole of it.

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She holds one up to the strip light. The white rays have gone the colour of old piano keys, and the yellow eye has shrunk to a hard orange knot with a curl in it, like a thumbprint pressed into clay. Behind her a lorry reverses with a beeping that goes on far too long. You remember the summer your mother showed you how the centre turns: each floret opens in a spiral, the way a clock hand would go backwards if time were polite. You don't say any of this. You say the seeds are for a garden in Kent, the one with the crooked gate.

The officer reads the label on the inside of the lid, written in your mother's looping capitals: DAISY, FOR THE BACK STEP, DON'T LET THEM TELL YOU IT'S A WEED. She laughs once, a short bark, and stamps something. "Seeds are a different form," she says. "Go on. Keep them dry."

Out in the car park the wind comes off the Channel with salt in it. You open the tin on the bonnet and shake a few heads into your palm, pale as old buttons. You tip them into your coat pocket, where they can dry out properly, and you start the engine.