Colour sunflower tattoo with grey daisies below it on a person's upper thigh, in a botanical realism style.

Sunflower and daisies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A realistic sunflower with yellow and orange petals and a dark centre sits on the side of the upper thigh. Below and behind it, several grey daisy-like flowers are drawn in soft shading with fine outlines. The sunflower is fully coloured while the daisies are rendered in black and grey, and the photo is taken at an angle with a lace garment at the top of the frame.

Botanical Realism Thigh Sunflower Daisy Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The heat coming off the tarmac has made the white line wobble, and the lorry driver who pulled over for you is already eating his sandwich in the cab. You stand by the bonnet of the hatchback with the map folded on the roof, and the only shade for forty miles is a corrugated stall where a man called Tobias Wren sells sunflower heads by the bucket. There is no price written anywhere, just a biscuit tin for coins and a pencil tied to a length of string.

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He asks where you're headed and you tell him the truth, which is a coast you have never seen. He nods as if that's a reasonable answer and hands you a sunflower head the size of a dinner plate, its seeds packed tight as a honeycomb and dark as a spent match. "Dries out gold if you leave it on a sill," he says. "The grey ones don't last. Daisies in this heat just fold up and go to paper." He points past the fence at a row of pale heads bent toward the dust, and you see they are the ones he has drawn in pencil on the back of a feed receipt, their petals shaded soft at the edges.

You offer to pay. He refuses, then lets you drop a coin in the tin anyway, and you carry the sunflower back to the car with its petals still bright enough to hurt. By the time you reach the junction the head has started to shed, yellow flakes skidding across the dashboard every time the wheel turns.

At the coast you prop it on the sill of a rented flat, and the first morning you find the grey daisies you had half-forgotten in your bag, pressed flat between the pages of a sketchbook, their outlines still holding their shape. You keep the sunflower until its centre is a clean black disc, then walk down to the water and let the tide take it.