Black and grey sunflower tattoo with shaded petals and a stippled centre, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single sunflower head is tattooed on the side of the torso, with the petals drawn in outline and shaded with soft grey tones. The centre is filled with fine dotted and concentric stippling that gives the seed head texture. The flower sits centrally in the frame against pale skin, with a striped bikini strap and a blurred indoor background visible around it.

Botanical Ribs Sunflower Flower Petal Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you climb eleven flights with the sunflower head wrapped in a tea towel under your arm, its seeds heavy and dry as lentils. Mrs Dunmore from flat fourteen swore the heads keep turning towards the light for days after they're cut, and you don't believe her until the stairwell window throws a bar of afternoon across the landing and the dried head on the sill swings to face it.

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Your nan grew these along the back fence in Stockton, tall as the coal shed, and she rubbed the seeds out between her palms into a biscuit tin for the sparrows. You never got the knack. Your tub on the walkway gave you one flower this year, a single stubborn head that the wind off the car park has bent three times. The seeds pack in rings that spiral out like the grooves of a record. You counted them once, lying on the concrete with your back against the railing, and lost track somewhere past two hundred.

Tonight the sixth floor is throbbing with a party and someone's telly is loud through the wall. You sit on the top step with the tea towel in your lap and pick the seeds out one by one into an empty margarine tub. Below, the bins glow orange under the security light, and the strip of cracked grass past the fence is the only ground the council hasn't tarmacked.

At dawn you go down, the lift still dead, and press the seeds into the soil by the fence post, one thumb-width deep, patting the earth flat. Nothing will show before the frost. When you look up, the kitchen bulb you left on has steam curling past it, and you find yourself turning, the way the head on the windowsill does, towards that warm square of light.