Colour tattoo of a sunflower with yellow and orange petals, a dark centre and green leaves and stem, on the inner forearm.

Sunflower tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A full-colour sunflower fills the forearm, with layered yellow and orange petals shaded softly to suggest depth. The dark brown and black centre is dotted with small orange-tipped seeds, and a large green leaf and stem run down the lower arm. Soft blue-green shading behind the petals gives the composition a faint background, and the photo is taken straight on under even indoor light.

Botanical Realism Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal Leaf Stem Seed

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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 sun had been sulking over the Marrowdale hills for three summers, so when the old miller's daughter climbed the wall of the orchard and asked me for a seed, I gave her the one from my own pocket without thinking. It was a dark, heavy thing, pitted like a cobbler's thimble, and I told her to plant it facing east. She did not ask why. Girls in that valley never asked why, which was why the valley had so many of them still alive.

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She planted it in the stony bit behind the well, where nothing ever grew, and she watered it with the milk she was supposed to take to market. Each morning she came back to look, and each morning the stalk had gone a little taller, its leaves broad and green as the cloth on a gamekeeper's table. The king's men rode through that spring and laughed at a girl kneeling in the dirt. By midsummer they had stopped laughing, because the thing behind the well had grown higher than the church tower and its face had turned, slow and patient, to follow the sun across the sky.

When the king came to see it himself he found a flower as wide as a cartwheel, petals the colour of new butter and marmalade, and in its heart a dark round dish crowded with small orange eyes. It looked at him, he swore afterwards, the way a tired mother looks at a child who has come home late. He turned his horse around and rode back to the city without a word. The miller's daughter still waters it, though now the milk comes from the king's own dairy, and nobody in Marrowdale has dared to ask her why.