Colour tattoo of two sunflowers and clusters of purple lilac with green leaves, running across an upper arm and onto the shoulder.

Sunflower and lilac sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two large sunflowers with dark seed heads dominate the design, with a cluster of small purple lilac blossoms and green leaves filling the gaps along the arm. The petals use yellow and orange with black outlines, and the seed heads are shaded in grey. The arm is shown from the side against a dark top and a wall of tattoo flash sheets, with the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Sunflower Flower Leaves Botanical Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sunflowers along the Varnay pass had been turning towards the west for three days when Tomas Haller came down the mule track with his boots tied together by their laces. Nobody in the village asked him where he had been. They looked at the flowers instead, which had never before agreed on anything, and then they looked at the wall where Ilse Marrow had planted lilac the spring her husband took the salt carts over the ridge and did not come back.

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Ilse had always said lilac would not grow where a man had lied to his wife. Her husband had promised her one more crossing, one more winter of coin, and then the snow had shut the high road like a door. The lilacs had come up anyway, low and purple along the stones, and the old women read this as a kind of stubbornness that belonged to Ilse and not to the plant.

Tomas stood in her kitchen with the snow still melting off his collar and told her what he had seen beyond the top of the pass. He had found the carts, or what was left of them, and beside them a row of sunflowers pushing up through the drift, each head as wide as a cartwheel, each one turned to follow a man who was no longer walking.

Ilse did not cry. She took her shawl from the hook and went out to the wall, and when she came back in the flowers had swung round to face her kitchen door, and the lilacs along the stones had opened a month early, as if someone had finally told them the road was closed.