Black and grey sunflower tattoo with script text on a woman's upper back, shown with gold chain body jewellery.

Sunflower and script tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower with a shaded centre and radiating petals sits on the upper back beside the shoulder blade, with partly visible script above it. The linework and shading are in black and grey, with soft grey tones across the petals. Gold chain body jewellery with chevron bars crosses the back, and the subject is photographed from behind against a bright window.

Botanical Back Sunflower Script Text Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's daughter planted the sunflowers in the spring after the boat did not come back. She dug them in along the wall of the lower yard, where the salt wind could not reach them, and carried water up from the cistern in two buckets every morning until the stalks were taller than the gate. Over the door her father had painted a board in black letters that read Patience is happiness, and he said the flowers were foolish. They turned their heads all day to follow the sun, he said, and a lamp did not need following.

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But the lamp at the top of the tower turned too, slow as a clock, and on still nights the girl stood in the yard and watched its beam sweep across the flowers. The flowers leaned into it, every head bowed toward the light as if it had called them by name. The tower had black chevron bands painted round it for the daymarks, and she used to count them with her finger while the light went round.

When the autumn gales came, the old keeper climbed the stair one last time with a lantern and did not come down. The girl kept the lamp burning through the winter alone, winding the weights by hand each evening and wiping salt from the glass with her sleeve. In spring the sunflowers came up again from seed that had dropped into the cracks of the wall, and the fishing boats coming in from the west saw a line of gold along the cliff and steered by it.

The girl never said which of them had been right about the flowers. She only left the board where it hung, and when the boats came round the point each evening she went out to the yard and stood among the stalks until the light found her too.