Black and grey sunflower inside an outlined triangle, with a thin zigzag arrow line beside it, tattooed on a forearm.

Sunflower in a triangle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower seen from above sits inside a large outlined triangle on the forearm, with dark petals and a shaded centre. A thin black zigzag line ending in an arrow runs to its left. The work uses black ink with grey shading, and the skin is photographed against a striped woven blanket.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Sunflower Triangle Zigzag Arrow Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ines had the seed-cutter in one hand and the tally slate in the other when the lamp dimmed for the third time that shift. The sunflower in bay nine did not notice. It kept its broad face angled toward the dead sodium tube at the far wall, the way it had been taught to since the ship left orbit, and the dark petals ringing its centre looked almost black under the grow-light's bruised glow.

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Her grandfather had drawn the triangle on the bulkhead before she was born: three lines with a sunflower pinned inside like a coin in a cup. He called it the Tracking Mark. Wherever the crop beds were mapped, the flower pointed, and the thin wire arrow running out from it, zigzagging like a weather trace, showed the drift of the air returners. Nobody on the ship remembered why the arrow kept zigzagging. Ines suspected it was the only honest thing on the wall.

She cut the head at the base, wrapped it in cloth, and counted the seeds through the fabric with her thumb. Four hundred and twelve. Enough for a season if the scrubbers held. She thought of the sealed hatch at the bottom of the spine, the one they were told would open when the green reached the outer rings, and how the sunflower had never once turned toward it.

She tucked the bundle inside her jacket, pressed the slate against the bulkhead beside the old mark, and drew a new line from the triangle's corner toward the hatch, the pen wobbling as the floor shivered under her boots. Then she switched off the dying lamp. Let them learn the dark for once. Someone would need to know which way was down.