Black and grey shaded sunflower tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a braided belt and jeans visible below.

Shaded sunflower on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower with layered, pointed petals radiates around a textured central disc. The petals use fine linework with soft grey shading, and the seed head is built up with stippled detail. The flower fills the frame on bare skin at the side of the torso, with jeans and a braided belt at the bottom of the photo.

Botanical Realism Ribs Sunflower Flower Petal Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed head was the size of a dinner plate by the time Dot Haskins lifted it off the fence post, holding it the way she'd hold a loaf out of the oven, both hands underneath and the dense centre turned up to the marquee lights. Her grandson Kieran had cut the stem at six that morning with the kitchen scissors. The rules for the Ashdown Produce Show said nothing about what hour a flower could be picked.

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The judge was Mr Ambrose Lowe, who had judged the show since before the war and had never once been seen to smile at a marrow. He walked the trestles with a magnifier on a cord round his neck. At the sunflowers he stopped, bent close, and began to count. Dot knew what he was counting. Along the disc the seeds turned in two sets of spirals, one clockwise and one against, and the pair of numbers always came out as neighbours in the old sequence, thirty-four and fifty-five, or fifty-five and eighty-nine, the way the petals fanned out when Frank laid them on the kitchen table in rings to show her.

Ambrose reached the end of Kieran's head and straightened up. He said it was the finest seed set he had seen in forty years, and that he could not give it first, because someone had clearly stippled every seed by hand, and the boy was nine. Kieran looked at his trainers. Dot looked at the pencil marks on the back of her own hand, where she'd been drawing the petal shapes for him all week, and understood that the boy had sat on the back step for an afternoon with a sewing needle and a jar of ink, and had never once asked her for help.

That night she tipped the seeds from the winning head onto newspaper at the kitchen table and counted them into paper envelopes, fifty to a packet. On the back of the last one she wrote the year, then the word FOR, and left a space, because the boy would know what to put.