Two photos of a forearm tattoo showing a yellow sunflower with black dotwork owl and mandala details, placed on the inner forearm and wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower and owl on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large sunflower with yellow petals and a dark centre sits at the centre of the design, with an owl's face and feathered patterns in black linework behind it. The black areas use fine dotwork and stippled shading, while the petals are filled with soft yellow tones. The left photo shows the full design near the wrist on a dark background, and the right photo is a close view of the same piece on the forearm.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Sunflower Owl Mandala Petal Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that colander, boy, and sit where the stove can warm your backside, because this one takes the length of a pot of stock to tell properly. There was a sunflower growing up through the cobbles of a harbour town called Sallowmere, and nobody had planted it. It came up in the gap where the fishmonger's drain met the wall, and by midsummer it stood taller than the bollards, turning its great face after the sun the way a sailor turns to a bell.

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Old Mabry the net-mender swore it was the only thing in Sallowmere that never lied about the weather. Every morning its head came round to the east before the gulls were awake, and the men said that was all the forecast they needed. Up on the bell tower lived an owl the colour of wet slate, and she came down each night to sit in the flower's shadow and watch the harbour mouth. Nobody ever saw them speak. But the owl kept the mice out of the nets, and the flower kept the owl company, and between them they minded the town.

Then came the autumn the herring went wrong. The boats came back empty three weeks running, and the sunflower bent its head lower every dawn, as though it were ashamed of being so bright.

On the fourth morning the owl did not come down. The flower turned east anyway, and there in the spill of light off the water lay a line of silver the length of a man's arm, the first shoal of the season, rising to nothing but the sun. Mabry ran down the slip shouting and the boats went out, and that winter the children of Sallowmere learned to read the sky from a yellow face and a grey bird with round dark eyes.