Black and grey botanical tattoo of a sunflower with leaves and a stem running down the inner upper arm.

Sunflower and leaves on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with layered petals and a stippled dotted centre sits at the top of the design, with a long stem curving down the arm. Several broad leaves are rendered with fine outlines and soft grey shading, and the petals and leaf veins are drawn with crisp linework. The design is entirely in black and grey ink on pale skin, filling the inner upper arm.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Sunflower Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pickering had grown the sunflower from a paper packet bought at the Michaelmas fair, and by August it stood taller than the church gate. Her grandson Tom carried the cut stem across the field in both arms, the dark heavy head bobbing against his chest, the leaves brushing his knees and leaving a green smell on his shirt. The judging tent at Harrow Green smelled of diesel and damp bunting, and the other growers had already set out their marrows like trophies.

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The fairground was packing up by evening. The big wheel had folded in on itself and the lorries idled by the gate, their headlamps raking the hedges. Ada's rival, a red-faced man called Doug Lusk who sold pig feed out of a van, had pinned a rosette to his own bloom before the judges had even walked the rows. Tom watched him and felt his face go hot.

The judge, a woman in a waxed jacket, held the head up to the lamp and turned it slowly. She counted the petals aloud, then ran her thumb over the centre, where the seeds sat in tight spirals like the grooves of a cut record. "Eighty-nine rows of seed," she said, "and not one missing." Doug went quiet.

Ada got the rosette, Doug got nothing, and the fair pulled out of the field in the dark with its lights going off one by one. Tom kept a single seed from the centre in his pocket all the way home, and planted it by the back step the next spring, where it came up crooked and stubborn through the cracks in the path.