Realistic colour tattoo of a sunflower with green stem, leaves and roots running down the calf.

Realistic sunflower with roots on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A tall sunflower with a bright yellow head and a dark orange-brown centre sits at the top of the design, with a long green stem, leaves and exposed roots extending down towards the ankle. The petals and leaves are shaded to appear three-dimensional, with soft highlights and gradients. The design fills the length of the lower leg against a plain, softly lit background.

Realism Botanical Calf Sunflower Flower Stem Leaves Root Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Halvorsen Crossing holds the twist of brown paper up to the strip light as if it might be a letter, then as if it might be something worse. You tell him it is seed. He asks what kind. You say sunflower, the tall kind, the kind that turns to follow the sun across a field and then, at the end of summer, bows its head so heavily the stalk snaps.

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He opens the paper. The seeds spill across the steel counter, grey-striped and ordinary. He is already reaching to wave you through when he sees the one you missed, still clinging to a crumb of soil, with a thread of pale root no longer than a fingernail. "These are for planting," he says. "You know they won't survive here without a licence." You know. Your grandfather grew the same variety by the railway line on the far side of the river, and when the fence went up in the spring the field was cut in two, and the sunflowers were left standing on the wrong side of it.

You tell him you aren't taking them to grow. You are taking them back. He is quiet for a long time, the queue behind you shifting bags and sighing. Then he takes a stamp from the drawer, presses it onto the form, and slides the paper back across the counter with the seeds folded carefully inside. "Keep them dry," he says. "Roots don't like a sealed bag."

Outside, the road runs east under a sky the colour of wet cardboard. You walk until the customs lights are a smudge behind you, then kneel in the verge, press three seeds into the cold earth with your thumb, and feel the ground take them the way it always has, without asking which side of the fence they were born on.