Small black sunflower tattoo with fine-line petals and a dotted centre on the inner ankle of a light-skinned leg.

Small sunflower tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small sunflower sits on the side of a lower leg just above the ankle, with a bold outline of pointed petals around a round, densely shaded centre. The linework is fine and even, and the centre uses stippled dots to create texture. The ink is solid black and grey against pale skin, with a tan leather brogue shoe and a wooden floor in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Ankle Sunflower Flower Petal Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias had counted the seeds twice before the Harriet Lowe cleared the Channel, forty-one of them, folded in a twist of brown paper that still smelled of his mother's kitchen. By the Azores the damp had crept into the paper and half had gone soft and grey. He kept the survivors in an empty Fry's cocoa tin wedged under his bunk, behind a coil of spare marline, and checked them every Sunday while the watch below was at prayers.

Keep reading

Mr Dunstable the bosun caught him at it somewhere south of the Line and made a great show of confiscating the tin. 'Rubbish to plant on a ship,' he said, turning it over in his scarred hands. 'Nothing grows where the wind never stops.' Tobias said nothing. He had heard it before, and the bosun was already tipping the seeds into his palm and squinting at them like a jeweller checking stones.

Off the Horn the seas came green over the rail for nine days, and the galley fire went out twice. On the tenth morning the sky cleared to a hard pale blue, and Tobias found the bosun on his knees by the scuppers, one seed pressed into a crack between the planks where a little grit had blown in with the coal dust. 'It won't come,' Dunstable said without looking up. 'Too late in the year for it.'

They made fast in Valparaiso in the middle of March. Tobias carried a bucket of harbour soil up the steep street to a yard with a broken wall, and when the single green shoot unfurled a fortnight later he sent word down to the dock. Dunstable came up the hill with his cap in his hands, looked at the seedling for a long time, and said nothing at all, which was as close as he ever came to saying well done.