Black and grey botanical tattoo of two sunflowers, a peony and smaller flowers with leaves across an upper arm and shoulder.

Sunflower and peony floral tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two sunflower heads, one at the top and one lower down, with a large peony-like bloom in the centre and smaller five-petalled flowers on the left. Leaves and petals are drawn in bold black outlines with light internal detail and very little shading. The photograph is monochrome, so the ink appears black and grey, and the design fills the upper arm and reaches onto the shoulder.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Sunflower Peony Flower Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sunflowers in bay nine had started to lean again, which meant the light panels were out of true. Tamsin Ferrier knelt on the grating with a magnifier strapped over one eye and counted the seed heads the way her grandmother had taught her, spiral by spiral, lips moving. Forty-one on the tall plant by the hatch. Forty-one would not feed the next rotation, and everyone on Clement knew it, though nobody said so at the mess tables.

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Her ledger was older than the station. Its pages were thick and grey as a rain cloud, and every bloom ever grown in the ring had a line drawn in it, each outline pressed black and bold with a fine nib. Halfway through, in a hand that shook a little, someone had drawn a peony with its petals folded like pleated linen, and beside it a note: last of the red strain, planted under a dead lamp, kept anyway. Tamsin had never seen one bloom. Its seed had been lost in the fourth cull, the one nobody talked about.

She found the packet on the fourth morning, tucked inside the spine where the binding had split. Six husks inside, dry as paper, and one of them rattled. She sat back on her heels and laughed quietly, because it was absurd to be moved by a seed. She planted it in the cold corner under the dead lamp, between the sunflowers, and watered it from her own ration cup.

Three weeks later the peony opened in the grey corner, heavy and ruffled, and the nearest sunflower swung its face round to look at it, the way they always did when a lamp moved. That night Tamsin drew it into the ledger in ink, with the same bold outline as the rest. Under it she wrote the date and nothing else, because the picture was enough.