Black and grey realism tattoo of a rose and a sunflower across the upper arm and shoulder of a person in a white vest top.

Rose and sunflower on a upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large rose sits high on the shoulder with a sunflower below it on the upper arm, both shaded with smooth grey tones and fine hatched detail. Dark leaves frame the rose and sunflower, and the petals show soft highlights that give the flowers depth. The black and white photograph is taken from behind and slightly to the side, with the background softly out of focus.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Rose Sunflower Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthgarrow would sell a rose to the widow Anstey after the wind took her glasshouse, so her grandson Tom walked the cliff path with a spade and a sack of his own bulbs. He found the old rose bush growing wild behind the chapel wall, its head gone grey with salt, and he dug round its roots until the earth came up black and wet.

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The rose had one bloom left, closed tight as a fist. Tom sat with it through the afternoon while the gulls came down on the slipway and went back up again. When the tide turned he heard his name called from the lane, Mrs Anstey wanting him in for supper, and he left the spade standing in the mud like a flag.

She had a sunflower in a pot on the sill, grown from a seed that came in a letter from her sister in Canada forty years before, and it had grown taller than the door frame. Its face followed the window all day, the way the men's faces followed the lifeboat out past the point. Tom told her about the rose. She said a rose wants shade at its root and sun on its leaves, a sunflower wants the reverse, and that was the whole trouble with growing anything in this town.

In the spring they planted the rose on the north side of the wall and the sunflower on the south. By midsummer the two had leaned together over the lane, the rose's head bowed low and the sunflower's raised high, and the shadows they threw across the cobbles were the same grey as the sea on a dull morning. Tom never did sell either of them. He just stood in the lane with his hands in his pockets, watching the shade walk back and forth.