Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sunflower with leaves inside a diamond frame, on the outer lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower in a dotwork diamond on a leg

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with a stem and two leaves is drawn in fine linework and stippled shading inside a large diamond shape. The dotwork background fills the diamond around the flower, giving the petals and seed head a soft, dimensional tone. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the tattoo on pale skin, with the diamond filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Calf Sunflower Diamond Leaves Stem Petal

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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 seed packet has been in your coat since Tuesday, folded twice and gone soft at the crease, and you keep touching it through the cloth as if it might slip out. Mr Okonedo at the station yard said the flowers in the high valley grow taller than a man on horseback, and that their heads turn to follow the sun across the sky like a row of dinner plates on poles. You did not believe him. You believe him now, because the stalk lying in the back of the cart already reaches past the splinter-board sides.

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Your sister wanted roses for the wall, the old dark kind that smell of pennies and rain. You told her the roses had been dying since your mother planted them, and she did not argue, which was worse. So you cut the bed by the north gate with a borrowed spade, measuring with knotted string, four long strides to each point, because you wanted something with edges the weather could not argue with. Each evening you stippled the dark soil with your thumb and fingers, pressing seed after seed into the ground in patient dots, until the earth around the planting looked like frost on a window.

By August the heads were broad as cartwheel hubs and heavy enough to bow their stems. You sit on the back step after supper and count the seeds in the centre, spiralled like clockwork, and every night there seem to be more. The bees come first, then the boys from the lane, then Winifred from the mill, who asks what you mean to do with so many. You tell her nothing. You are only keeping them, you think, in case the wall ever needs something to face the light.

When the frost comes you will cut the heads and hang them in the scullery to dry. Your sister will say the house smells of hay. You will say it smells of summer, and for once she will not argue with you.