Colour tattoo of a cream sunflower with green leaves on the upper arm, outlined in black in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower and leaves on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cream sunflower with a dark brown centre sits on the upper arm, with green leaves curling out from behind the top and bottom of the bloom. The petals and leaves have bold black outlines and soft shading in cream, yellow-brown and several greens. The flower is centred on the arm, and the skin and a white sleeveless top fill the rest of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Sunflower Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Cardew Bridge held my grandmother's seed tin up to the strip light as if a second tin might be hiding behind the first. Inside were forty pale sunflower seeds, dried to the colour of old piano keys, and a folded note in her looping hand that said only: for the south field, where the bees go.

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"What are they?" he asked. I told him sunflowers, though not the yellow kind. He laughed and said the only ones he'd ever seen were on postcards. Cream, I said. Like milk left too long in a saucer. The heads turn after the sun all day, and then one morning the middle goes dark and brown, and that's when you know they're ready to give up their seeds.

He prised the lid off, sniffed, and didn't write anything down. Behind me a lorry idled, its driver tapping the horn twice, then a third time out of spite. My grandmother had taught me that officers read faces more than papers, so I kept mine on the green leaves printed on the tin, curling round the flower like hands cupped around a match.

He shut the lid and pushed it back across the counter. Then he reached into his shirt pocket, took out a single seed he must have kept from some other tin, and slid it into my palm. "Plant one on your side," he said, "and see which way it turns." The barrier lifted. I walked out into the flat grey light, and I didn't look back at the lorry, or at him, but I kept my hand closed around that seed the whole way to the car.