Botanical tattoo across the upper back showing five plant stages growing from seed to sunflower, with the words How strange it is to be anything at all beneath.

Five-stage plant growth with a quote on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows five plants in a row, rising from small round seeds with fine roots to a fully open sunflower-like bloom, with a line of serif lettering beneath reading How strange it is to be anything at all. The linework is dark and clean, with soft green and yellow fills on the stems, leaves and flower petals and light shading on the seed pods. The row spans the upper back, with the largest bloom placed toward the top right of the design.

Botanical Back Plant Seed Sunflower Root Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the fire has no interest in keeping us warm past midnight. You want the tale of Mabel Quinlan and her five seeds. Everyone in Hollin Dene knows some version of it, but you've never heard it from someone who was there, and I was, though I was only a boy with muddy knees and a grudge against the vicar's marrow patch.

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Mabel came up the lane from the edge of Ashcombe Wood the spring after her mother died, carrying a biscuit tin with a dent in its lid. Inside were five round seeds wrapped in a scrap of blue wool, and she would not say where she'd got them. She planted them along the south wall of her cottage, one a week apart, so that each would wake at its own time. The first pushed up a single leaf before the blackthorn was out. The second put down roots as fine as hair, and she'd lift the soil with a spoon every evening just to look at them, then pat it back in like someone tucking a child under a blanket.

By midsummer the row stood there like a queue of people waiting for a bus that was late. The vicar said it was a waste of good wall. Mrs Abernethy said the seeds were foreign and would bring the blight. Mabel only said that a seed doesn't know it's meant to be a sunflower until it's standing in the light, and that it's not the seed's business to worry about the others. She went on watering them with the water she carried up from the beck.

The last one opened the week the swifts left. It rose taller than the lychgate, and its face was as wide as a cartwheel, and the bees came from three parishes to see it. Mabel sat on her step with her hands in her lap and watched it turn to follow the sun across the sky. Now, who's going to fetch the kindling? Not you, Edwin, you've had enough of the cider.