Black and grey dotwork and fine line sunflower tattoo with shaded leaves, centred on the chest between the breasts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with outlined petals and a densely stippled centre sits in the middle of the chest, with shaded leaves spreading to either side. The petals use crisp single-line outlines, while the centre and leaves are built from dots that create soft shading. The tattoo is in black and grey ink against plain skin, with a white shirt lifted at the left edge of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Chest Sunflower Leaves Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down before the dust settles, because you will want to hear about the Queen of Harrow Vale and the gardener who could not stop her turning. She was a sunflower, mind, not a woman, though the old men of the vale argued that point over their ale for forty years. Every morning she lifted her broad gold face to the eastern ridge and waited for the sun to climb over it, and every evening she bowed her head like a courtier leaving a king's table.

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The gardener was called Emrys Tallow, and he had a daughter, Ione, born in the hungry winter when the wheat rotted in the furrows. Emrys planted one seed for every child in the vale that year, and when summer came, only the seed for Ione grew taller than a man. Its head was the size of a cartwheel. Its centre was packed so thick with seeds that the bees gave up on it, and the crows sat along its edge like judges.

The trouble came in autumn. The king's tax-men came up the valley road with a ledger and a cart, and they wanted the great flower cut down for the palace kitchens, because a sunflower that size must be full of oil. Emrys stood in the path with a rake. Ione, who was nine, climbed the stalk and sat in the bloom, and the tax-men, who had never been told a sunflower could be stubborn, went home without it.

Every year since, the vale's children plant their seeds in rows, and the flowers always face east, though no gardener has taught them to. Count the seeds in the dark middle of one if you doubt me. Ione did, the winter she turned ten, and she said there were as many as the stars over the ridge, which is why the vale has never been short of light.