Colour botanical tattoo of a sunflower on a shoulder and upper back, with black silhouette birds and drifting petals above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower and birds on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large sunflower with yellow petals, a shaded purple-brown centre and green leaves sits on the shoulder blade area. A trail of black silhouette birds rises from the sunflower up towards the neck, with yellow and teal petals drifting between them. The shading is soft and the composition flows diagonally across the upper back.

Botanical Shoulder Back Sunflower Bird Petal Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad always said you could tell the end of the season by the sunflowers. By the last week of September the heads on the verge outside Hexham had gone heavy and bowed, and Pellow's Travelling Marvel was packing its coconut shies into the lorries in the rain. I was ten that year and sold roasted seeds from a paper cone at the gate, which made me the only person on the ground allowed to eat the profits.

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Old Tobias ran the waltzer and kept a wicker cage on the back of his wagon with six starlings in it, bought off a man in Carlisle who couldn't feed them. Every dusk he unlatched the little door and whistled the organ tune from the carousel, and the birds rose over the caravans in a black ribbon, wheeling until the lamps came on, then dropped back into the cage one by one like coins into a tin. He never once let them go for good. He said a bird that's fed knows where its supper is.

The evening the cage stayed open, I found him behind the big wheel, cutting sunflower heads off their stalks with a pocketknife and stacking them on a crate. Some petals had come loose in the wind and skittered across the gravel, yellow and blue-green where he had mixed the gondola paint on them. He didn't look up. 'They're off to the coast,' he said. 'Stubble fields, then the salt marsh. Better than a tin.' I asked whether he'd go too. He tapped the crate and told me to bring the seeds.

At dusk I stood by the empty wagon and whistled the carousel tune, badly. Eleven starlings came back over the caravans and settled on the rail, and I counted them twice. The twelfth had gone where the petals went, and I kept the cage door open for it anyway.