Black and grey sunflower tattoo with detailed petals and a shaded centre, placed on a woman's shoulder in fine line botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower is tattooed on the top of the shoulder, with the back of the subject's dark hair visible above it. The petals are drawn with clean, outlined linework, and the seed head is shaded with dense stippling and hatching. The ink is black and grey against the skin, and the subject wears a pale yellow top, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Shoulder Sunflower Flower Petal Seed head

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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

Sit closer, the lamps only pretend to be warm. You want to hear about the sunflower girl? Everyone in Port Alder knew her, though nobody knew her name, because she came in on the last ferry in October with one cardboard case and a seed packet tucked inside her coat.

Keep reading

She took a room above the chandler's on Gull Street and planted the packet in a cracked washtub on the fire escape. Nothing came up but leaves for a month. The neighbours laughed. Mr Oduya from the bakery said she'd been sold a fake. Then one night in June the stalk shot up in an hour, and by morning a head as wide as a cartwheel hung over the rail, and it turned, slow as a clock hand, to follow the lamplighter across the square.

The city did not like things that turn. The harbour master sent a letter. The council sent a man with a clipboard who stood under the bloom at midnight and counted its seeds, forty thousand, fifty thousand, until the petals bowed all at once like a congregation at prayer, and the man went home and never came back for his clipboard.

Here is the thing you must keep, my dear. She never once asked the sunflower to face her. She only ever faced it back. On the night the ferry came for her again, the washtub was empty and the rail was bare, and every window on Gull Street had a single black seed set on its sill, all pointing towards the water, waiting for the sun to come round.