Colour tattoo of a sunflower with a dark centre and green leaves on the outer upper arm, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sunflower with golden-yellow petals, a dark brown centre and a curving green stem with two leaves is tattooed on the outer upper arm. The petals and centre use soft shading and fine detail, while the stem and leaves are shaded in greens. The flower sits centred on the arm against a plain light wall and dark sleeve.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Sunflower Flower Leaves Stem

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

Nobody on the early platform at Coldharbour Junction bought sunflowers before October, which was why Ivy Pearce kept planting them along the embankment anyway. She went down the bank each morning with a trowel in her coat pocket and a flask of tea, and by seven the stalks stood higher than the fence, their heads turned to the east like a row of people waiting for a train that was late.

Keep reading

The ticket clerk, Desmond Hale, said they looked like hats left on a hook. Ivy told him hats didn't follow anything. She had read somewhere that a young head turns with the sun across the day and then, when it has finished, swings back to face the morning, and she liked the idea of a thing so set on its direction that it forgot itself at dusk. Desmond thought that was rubbish, but he carried her crates up the steps without being asked.

The autumn the line closed for resignalling, the bank went to seed. Ivy kept cutting the heads that had gone dark and brown in the middle, laying them on the bench in the waiting room beside the kettle. Nobody asked what they were for. People took them home in carrier bags, and one woman rang the station months later to say hers had stood on her kitchen windowsill all winter, facing the glass.

On the last day before the platform was lifted, Ivy stood at the end of the bank with the sun coming up behind the signal box. The heads swung round together, slow as a clock hand, and she realised she had been waiting for the same thing for thirty years. She picked the nearest one, the largest, and carried it up the steps without looking back at the rails.