Black and grey botanical tattoo of a sunflower with lavender sprigs and leaves on the inner forearm.

Sunflower and lavender bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower head with a stippled centre sits at the top of a bouquet that includes several spikes of lavender-like flowers and broad leaves, tied together by a stem. The linework is dark and even, with dotted shading in the sunflower's centre and fine hatching on the petals and leaves. The design is rendered in black and grey on pale skin, with the bouquet angled diagonally up the forearm.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Sunflower Lavender Bouquet Leaves Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oakes had been dead a fortnight before the plate was finished, so it fell to Nell Harrow to put the last dots into the sunflower's heart. She sat at the sloping desk by the north window with a lens in one eye and a needle no thicker than a hair between her fingers, stippling the seed head one speck at a time. Her father had taught her that the eye would forgive a wayward line long before it forgave a clumsy dot, so she worked slowly, letting the dark gather toward the middle the way dusk gathers in a hedge.

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The bouquet had arrived from a Kensington garden in late August, packed in a wet tin by a widow who wanted it drawn before the frost. Nell had cut the stems herself and bound them with waxed thread: the great yellow head, three spires of lavender gone grey at the tips, and a pair of broad leaves to hide the binding. Her father's rule was that every plant must look as though it had been picked that morning, so she hatched the petals in fine strokes, one set running left and one running right, until the flowers seemed to lean into the paper.

On the last afternoon the light went early and she worked by the lamp. When at last she lifted the lens, she saw she had drawn the sunflower with its face turned a little toward the window, as though it had heard her moving about the room. She nearly rubbed it out. Instead she sent the plate to the printer as it stood, and the widow, who received the first proof in a brown envelope, wrote back only to say that the flower looked as if it were listening.