Colour sunflower with black script reading A Cruce Salus across the top of a foot, with red toenail polish.

Sunflower and script on the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A sunflower with yellow petals, a brown centre, and a green stem and leaves is joined to black script reading A Cruce Salus across the top of a foot. The flower is shaded with blended tones and dark outlines, while the lettering is solid black with a flowing hand-written line. A striped fabric lounger and red toenail polish appear around the foot in the photograph.

Lettering Botanical Other Sunflower Script Latin phrase Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sunflowers along the Cut came up late that year, after a wet spring had kept the towpath soft and the locks running slow. My uncle Ray swore they turned to follow the barge, and by August I half believed him. We had the Marjorie Bell tied up below the bridge, her hold full of Staffordshire clay for a pottery that hadn't paid us since May.

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Ray kept a tin of brass tacks in the wheelhouse, and above the stove a painted board lettered in faded gold with a motto his father had copied from a chapel wall: A Cruce Salus. Ray translated it once as salvation from the cross, then shrugged and said it was mostly a thing to stare at while the kettle boiled. When I asked whether the sunflowers were holy, he laughed. 'It means you get the gate open before the rain,' he said, and went below.

The pottery man came down the towpath on the third morning, hat low, with a cheque he promised would clear by Friday. Ray folded it into the tin with the tacks and said nothing. When the man had gone, Ray walked up the bank and came back with a dinner plate of sunflowers he'd cut with the bread knife, the heads heavy as hams.

We cast off with the lock gates still dripping. Ray set one flower on the roof, face to the sky, and told me to watch it. By Hatherton the petals had browned at the edges, but the head kept swinging round after the sun, slow as a clock hand, all the way to the bend where the water opened out wide and bright. Ray didn't say a word. He didn't need to.