Black and grey sunflower tattoo on a shoulder, with the script words you are my sunshine running out beside it towards the collarbone.

Sunflower and script on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with shaded petals and a dark centre sits on the top of the shoulder, with the script words you are my sunshine written across the petals and extending to the right towards the chest. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey, with the petals fading to lighter tones. The photograph is taken outdoors against blurred trees, with the subject's upper body and a black strapless top in the frame.

Botanical Lettering Shoulder Sunflower Flower Script Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told twice that the walled garden was for cabbages and comfrey, and twice he had planted sunflowers along the south wall anyway. The seed had come in a paper packet from his sister in Cork with a note saying they grew taller than a man if you let them. Abbot Columba considered this vanity. I considered it a long argument I intended to win by August.

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The song came with the seed. My sister sang it to us on the ferry when we were small, a tune about sunshine being taken away, and I found I could not stop humming it over the hoe. The brothers at Vespers pretended not to notice. Only old Brother Gerard, who had been deaf to the Office for a decade, tapped his foot in the choir stalls whenever I got a verse wrong.

By late summer the heads had grown heavy and bowed, every one of them turned east towards the bell tower as if they had been told the hour. One morning in September the abbot came down the path with his hood up against the rain, stopped at the wall, and stood looking at the flowers for longer than I had ever seen him look at anything living. "They follow the light," he said. "I used to think that was a fault in them."

I did not answer. He took a seed head between two fingers, rubbed it, and slipped a handful into his own sleeve. At Compline he sang the verse under his breath, badly, and nobody in the stalls said a word. The packet is still in my desk. It promises flowers taller than a man, and I have decided that is the only promise I need.