Black and grey botanical tattoo of a sunflower, a closed bud and leaves on a forearm, with stippled dotwork shading in the flower centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with a closed bud below it and leaves curling up the limb, with a stem running diagonally across the design. The linework is fine and dark, and the sunflower's centre is built from dense stippled dots, while the petals and leaves use hatched lines and light shading. The design is in black and grey ink and fills the length of the arm against a white towel.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Sunflower Leaves Bud Stem Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came down on the Wednesday before the show, and Alf Pryor stood at the gate of plot fourteen with his hands in his coat pockets, counting the heads that had not made it. Seven sunflowers had been staked along the south fence since June. Four had opened. The tallest, the one he had talked to through a whole wet July, had its face turned towards the chapel wall as if it had given up on the sun.

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His granddaughter Maisie came down the path with a flask and a cheese sandwich in greaseproof paper. She crouched beside the last bud on the stem, the one still shut tight as a fist, and said it would never open now. Alf said nothing. He knew that the middle of a sunflower is a hundred small hard seeds set in spirals, each one placed with more patience than he had ever given a letter, and that the plant keeps its final bud for the cold because it has nothing left to prove by then.

She asked if he would cut it for the show anyway. He took out the penknife with the bone handle that had been his father's, cut the stem a hand's width below the bud, and wrapped it in the Saturday paper. "It'll not win," he said. "But it'll keep."

On the bus home she held it upright between her knees, the bud knocking softly against the window at every bend, like something still meaning to wake. Alf watched the flat fields slide past, grey under the low sky, and thought he might pin it to the kitchen wall above the sink, where the morning light came in sideways and found things that were not finished yet.