Sunflower tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A sunflower is tattooed on the forearm, with yellow and orange petals radiating around a dark green centre. The petals have soft, painterly edges and the colour looks slightly blurred or faded in places. The arm is held near the body, with a cream sleeve and floral shorts visible in the frame.

Botanical Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sunflower came up between the sleepers at Thornley Road the spring the line was closed, and nobody could say who had planted it. Stationmaster Ada Pell swept the platform every morning, and every morning the flower was a little taller, its head turned towards the east where the rails ran off under the fells. The porters said it was a bad omen. The signalman said it was only seed carried in on a coal wagon.

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By August it stood higher than the water tank. Its petals were the colour of the lamp oil in the waiting room, and its centre was dark as the ground after rain. Ada noticed that it followed the sun across the sky though it was rooted in one place, and she thought of her brother, who had gone out on the last train to the mills and never come back. She told the flower about him, because there was nobody else left at the station to tell.

In September a lad came down the track with a bag on his shoulder and asked which way it was to the coast. Ada pointed with the broom. He looked at the sunflower and said his mother grew them in a yard in the town, and that they always faced home. Ada gave him a ticket for nothing and the heel of a loaf, and watched him walk west until the cutting swallowed him.

When the first frost came, the sunflower bowed its head and dropped its seeds onto the line. Ada gathered a handful and kept them in her coat pocket. The next spring there were a dozen more plants, and the spring after that she stopped sweeping them away.