Coloured line drawing of a sunflower, two red poppies and teal poppy seed pods on a white background, with red and orange dots behind, shown as a botanical tattoo design.

Sunflower and red poppies design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A bold botanical illustration of a large yellow sunflower with a dark brown centre, framed by two red poppies and three teal poppy seed pods. The thick black outlines and layered petal shading give it a painted, traditional feel, with red and orange dots scattered behind the motifs. The composition is a vertical arrangement on a plain white background, with the sunflower centred and the poppies above and below it.

Botanical Neo-trad Sunflower Poppy Flower Petal Dot

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain started before the stallholders had their awnings tied, and by eight you have given up on the sunflowers and are dragging the poppies under the tarpaulin. The red ones are bruised already, their paper petals thin as cigarette papers, and the buckets of seed heads at the back have gone grey-green with damp. Someone two stalls down is shouting about his cabbages. Your hands smell of cut stems and wet cardboard.

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Dev from the fishmonger's comes over with two coffees and the look of a man who knows you were up past three again, sketching at the kitchen table. He nods at the sunflowers, heads bowed like schoolchildren waiting outside the head's office, and says they'll sell if you let them stand in the sun, which there isn't any of. You tell him the poppy pods are your grandmother's seed, saved in a biscuit tin with the year written on the lid in biro. He says that's sentimental nonsense, then buys three of the teal pods for his windowsill and pays with a fistful of coins.

By eleven the crowd thins to dog walkers and a man selling phone cases. You unwrap the last sunflower and find the middle has gone soft at one edge where the rain got in. You trim it with the good scissors. The dark centre still holds its spiral of seeds, neat as a clock face, and for once the orange pollen has washed clean off your fingers.

You wrap the best poppy in brown paper, write a price on it in marker, and leave it on the counter for whoever comes next. Then you carry the tin to the van, lid dated in your grandmother's hand, and drive home with the wipers going, counting the pods you have left.