Colour tattoo of a sunflower with a green stem and leaf on the side of a ribcage, shaded in yellow, orange and brown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A sunflower in full bloom, with a dark brown centre and petals shaded from yellow to deep orange, sits on the side of the torso. A green stem curves down from the flower to a large, shaded green leaf at the bottom of the frame. The petals use soft gradients and fine outlines, and the background is plain skin with black fabric at the top edge.

Botanical Realism Ribs Sunflower Flower Stem Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sunflower came up in the gap between the coal bunker and the water tank, where I'd flicked the seeds the autumn my father stopped steering. Nobody planted it. Birds, maybe, or the bag of feed Mrs Okonedo swore she'd emptied. By June it was taller than the chimney on the back cabin, and it turned its face to the lock every morning as if it was waiting for a boat it knew.

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We were coming down through Hatton with forty tonnes of gravel for a yard in Warwick, and the lock-keeper, a thin man called Pryce who wore his cap indoors, leaned on his gate and watched the flower lean over the cabin roof. "Your father grow that?" he asked. I said no. He said it looked like a man who'd been told to keep his head up and had decided to do it out of spite.

Dad would have laughed at that. He died in March, in a hospital bed in Coventry, still asking after the diesel. I kept the boat moving because stopping felt like the wrong sort of quiet. Thursdays I cut the dead heads off and left the seed heads for the finches, the way he'd have told me to.

At Warwick the yard man counted the gravel twice and gave me short. I didn't argue. I went back up to the roof and stood under the flower, its petals gone the colour of old brass, its centre dark and close as a fresh-turned bed, and I picked the largest seed head clean with my thumb. I put it in my pocket for the next lock.