Realistic grey skull surrounded by orange and yellow sunflowers, tattooed across an upper arm and shoulder.

Skull and sunflowers on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A shaded grey skull, seen from the front, is framed by large yellow and orange sunflowers with dark brown centres that wrap around the upper arm and onto the shoulder. The skull uses soft greyscale shading and fine detail in the teeth and eye sockets, while the sunflower petals use bright, saturated colour with gradients. The tattoo fills the frame, with a blurred indoor background showing a tattoo convention setting.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Skull Sunflower Flower Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up out of the lower forty in March, the same week Dad ploughed the north field for the first time since the drought. Nobody in Mercy could say whose it was, and the sheriff stopped asking after a fortnight. Ma would not have it in the house, so Dad set it on the fence post at the end of the sunflower row, where the seed heads had been swinging all spring like they were waiting for a bus.

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The sunflowers had come in with the first rain, a whole field of them, and by July they stood higher than the church roof. I walked the rows every morning with a tin bucket, counting heads and pinching out the ones the goldfinches had already hollowed. Mrs Pruitt at the feed store gave a penny a head for seed, and she always looked past me at the post when she paid, as if the skull might ask for a cut.

It never did ask for anything. What it did was sit in the sun all day with its jaw slightly open, grinning at the wheat, while the flowers turned on their stalks to follow the light across the sky. Dad said they kept doing that until they grew too heavy to lift their faces, and then they bowed down to the ground and stayed that way, facing whichever direction the sun had last been.

In September I cut the last head, dried it on the porch rail, and carried it down to the post. I set it beside the skull so they faced the same way, east, where the sun came up over the Pruitt barn. Ma called from the kitchen. I told her I'd be along directly. Neither of them seemed in any hurry.