Colour tattoo of a sunflower with green leaves and the script 'You are my sunshine' running down the side of the ribs, in a botanical style with black outlines.

Sunflower and script on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large sunflower with layered yellow and orange petals and a shaded dark centre sits at the top of the design, with black outlines around each petal. Green leaves branch off a vertical stem, and the words 'You are my sunshine' in flowing black script run down between them. The colour is saturated against the pale skin, with soft shading on the petals and leaves.

Botanical Lettering Ribs Sunflower Leaves Stem Script Text Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Crake planted sunflowers along the lane the spring her husband went down the pit and did not come up. Every morning she walked out to see which way they had turned, and every evening she scolded them for leaning toward the church instead of the sun. The village thought it a sad habit. Mabel thought it sensible, since a flower you could argue with was a flower that stayed put.

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The winter the cold came early, the sun went behind the hill for three weeks and did not come round. The farmers' wives said it was spite. The children stopped playing out. Mabel took a bucket of seed and a lantern up to the top field, where the stalks had gone brown and bent to the frost. She knelt among them and sang the one song her husband used to hum over the washing, the tune with the sunshine in it, badly, because she had never had a voice.

Nothing happened all night. Then, at the grey edge of morning, a single head lifted off the stubble, dull as an old coin, and turned its face to the ridge. Another followed, then the whole field, stalks creaking like the boards of a boat. By noon the sun had found its way over the hill and was resting on Mabel's shoulders like a shawl she had forgotten she owned.

Mabel never told anyone she had sung. She said the flowers had only remembered where they were meant to be. The following spring she gave the village their seed for nothing, with one instruction: sing as badly as you like, but keep turning toward the light.