Black and grey sunflower tattoo with shaded petals and a dark centre on a thigh, with a small script line tattooed near the waistband of black underwear.

Sunflower tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower is tattooed on the outer thigh, drawn with fine outlines and soft grey shading that gives the petals depth and a dimensional look. The dark centre is filled with stippled texture. A thin line of script sits lower down near the waistband of black underwear, and the photograph is taken close up in warm, natural light.

Botanical Realism Thigh Sunflower Flower Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't touch the tin yet, boy, the lamp's still smoking and Mrs Oyelaran will have my hide if we spill seed on the bunk. Sit where I can see your hands. That tin came aboard at Cádiz, packed in brown paper by a seedsman's widow who swore every seed in it was grown in a yard facing east, so the flowers would greet the morning before anyone else on the coast.

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We were eleven weeks out, bound for the Cape with a hold full of Sheffield steel, and the men had stopped looking at the horizon. Every watch somebody stood at the rail counting swells, as if they could be talked into a wind. I pressed a pinch of seed into the damp cloth of an old biscuit tin lid and set it on the sill where the sun came through the scuttle at noon.

Three days on, a green shoot came up like a question. By the second week the stalk had leaned so hard toward the light that the cook swore it had spotted land. Its head opened with a dark centre like a compass rose someone had rubbed with the side of a pencil, and the petals came out in rows, each row shading into the next the way light lies across a turned sea. Nobody wanted to be the one who said we should eat the seeds.

When we raised the Cape the flower had gone to seed, heavy and bowed. I gave the head to the first girl I met on the quay in Simon's Town, and she laughed and said it was the dullest present a sailor ever brought her. She planted it anyway. Now put that tin back where you found it, and mind the lamp.