Black and grey dotwork sunflower tattoo with leaves, placed on the chest below the bust, with a white shirt lifted to the side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey sunflower with a dark, stippled centre and outlined petals sits on the chest, below the breasts. Leaves on either side are shaded with dots and light linework, and the tattoo is centred on the torso. The image is a close, well-lit crop of the skin with a hand holding up a white shirt at the top.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Sunflower Leaves Flower Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother said the sunflowers would never survive the salt, and for two summers she was right. Then Dad dug a trench along the lee of the wall below the lamp room and filled it with compost we hauled up the hundred and eighteen steps in buckets. The third year they came up thick and green and stood their ground against the wind off the bay, their heads as broad as dinner plates.

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Each morning the heads swung east to follow the sun over the headland, and each dusk they turned back to face the lamp. Dad said they were only doing his job, keeping an eye on the light. I thought it was just weather and wanting. The centre of every flower was a dense crowd of seeds, black as the tar on the boat hulls, packed in spirals so tight you could count them if you had the patience, and that year I had nothing but patience.

In October a gale drove a trawler onto the skerry while Dad lay in the cottage with his chest. I climbed up alone, wound the clockwork by hand, and kept the beam turning until the boat men shouted from the rocks that they had their boat off the reef. At first light the sunflowers were bent low and grey with rain, and I thought they had given up on us. Then the sun broke through the cloud, and every head lifted its face towards the tower, as if the tower were the thing to follow now.

I cut the best one that week and hung it to dry from a nail in the lamp room. When the crew came up to thank me, I gave each of them a fistful of its seeds wrapped in brown paper, and told them to plant them somewhere the wind could not reach.