Colour botanical tattoo of a sunflower with a ladybird and green leaves on a woman's shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower and ladybird on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large sunflower with layered golden petals and a brown seed centre fills the shoulder, with a red ladybird on the flower head. Green leaves with a small water droplet frame the design at the lower edge. The rendering uses soft colour gradients and smooth shading, set against a dark background and a white lace top.

Botanical Shoulder Sunflower Ladybird Leaves Water droplet Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad grew sunflowers on the tip because nothing else would take. The slag heap behind Hollins Row ran grey all the way to the chapel wall, and every August the seeds he pushed into its crumbling edges came up taller than the men who walked past them to the cage. Mam said it was daft. Mrs Pritchard said it was a sign. I said nothing, because I was nine and carried the watering can.

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The ladybirds came with the aphids, which Dad said was the only sensible arrangement God ever made. I'd pick them off the leaves and let them walk across my knuckles, red as the brake lights on Mr Dobson's van, counting spots until one lifted its wings and went. Dad said a ladybird on your hand meant the weather would turn kind. It was the kind of thing you believed in down a pit village, where the only other promises were the shift whistle and the next fall of roof.

The winter the pit shut, the men stood about the pithead with their hands in their pockets and nobody knew what to do with the afternoons. Dad went up the tip every morning with a hoe. The sunflowers had gone brown and bowed, heads heavy with seed, and the ladybirds had gone wherever ladybirds go to sleep. He cut one head with his penknife, its centre full of dark spirals, and carried it down the hill like a tray of bread.

He pinned it above the kitchen sink. Last week I found a single ladybird asleep in the folds of the petals, so small and stiff it could have been a button. I didn't tell him. I let it stay where it was, and when the morning light came through the window it looked, for a moment, as if the whole hillside had come home to the kitchen.