Black and grey sunflower tattoo with shaded petals and a stippled centre on the wrist and lower forearm, with a hand clenched in front.

Sunflower tattoo on the wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower with layered petals wraps around the wrist, shown from the back of the hand. The petals use fine outlines with soft grey shading, and the centre is stippled to suggest texture. The image is entirely black and grey, with the wrist centred against a pale wall and dark surface.

Botanical Realism Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sunflower at the far end of Pardoe's orchard, where the last row of Bramley trees gives way to a strip of rough ground nobody has mown since June. It stands taller than the fence, its head bent under its own weight, and the petals have gone the colour of old pennies at the edges. Your uncle says a bird dropped the seed there years ago. He says most good things start that way.

Keep reading

The wasps are busy in the windfalls, and the air smells of cider and crushed grass. You kneel with a paper bag and a kitchen knife and work the head free from its stalk. The centre is a dense honeycomb, each seed locked into its own small socket, and you count the rows with your thumb while the light stretches long across the trees. You reach forty-one before you lose your place. Your uncle laughs at you for trying.

That evening the bag goes on the kitchen table, and he tips the seeds onto a newspaper and rubs the husks off between his palms until the room is full of chaff. He picks out a dozen of the plumpest, tips them into an old tin lid, and presses the lid into your hand. "Plant them where the sun hits before noon," he says. "And don't blame me when they face the wrong way."

The next spring you dig a hole at the foot of the orchard wall and push one seed down with your finger. By August a green stalk has climbed past the wall's top stones, and its head has begun to swing after the sun each morning, slow and patient, the way you have been learning to do.