Colour tattoo of a sunflower with a closed bud and green leaves on a forearm, shaded in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A sunflower bloom with yellow and orange petals and a dark brown centre, joined by a curving green stem to a closed bud and two broad leaves. The petals and leaves use soft shading and highlights to give a realistic, dimensional look. The design sits on a forearm against a dark striped background, with the bloom at the centre of the frame.

Realism Botanical Forearm Sunflower Flower Bud Leaves Stem Petal

Find an artist for this

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 sunflowers came up along the embankment the summer after the signal box closed, and nobody had planted them on purpose. Mr Pryce, who had worked that box for thirty-one years, swore it was birdseed blown from the carriage windows, and he should know, since he had swept up enough of it.

Keep reading

I was nineteen and working the ticket hatch at Hollin Cross, selling single fares to people going somewhere I had never been. Every morning before the 7.12 I walked the cinder path with a watering can that had lost its rose. By August the flowers stood taller than me, and their heads turned slowly to follow the sun across the sky. I told Mr Pryce they were the only passengers in the county who always knew where they were headed.

The last bud came late, the highest one on its stalk, closed tight as a fist. I thought it would rot before the frosts. Then in September an envelope arrived at the hatch with my name on it in a hand I didn't recognise, postmarked from a city I had only ever seen on timetables. Inside was a single line: Keep the bud. Don't cut it. I'll come for the seed when it's ripe.

I kept it. The head bowed under its own weight through October, and on the morning of the first hard frost the petals finally opened, gold and dark-centred against the grey platform. I still didn't know who had written. But when the 7.12 pulled in, a man in a green coat stepped down, looked long at the flower, and held out his hand for the seed head as though he had been expecting it all along.