Black and grey sunflower tattoo with fine line petals and shaded centre on the outer upper arm, near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey sunflower sits on the outer upper arm, close to the elbow, with the head shown in a three-quarter view. The petals are drawn with fine, sketchy linework and dark shading at their bases, while the centre has dense stippled texture. The plain light background and white fabric at the right keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Sunflower Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the nurses' station has said twenty past three since midnight, and nobody has bothered to fix it, so you go by the light instead. On a March night that means the grey smear over the car park that arrives much later than you think it should. You have been on Ward 9 for six hours and your feet have stopped reporting in.

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Mrs Pryce in bay four asks you every hour whether it is light yet. You tell her not long now, which is true in the way most things on nights are true. She wants her daughter on the phone, not the voicemail of her daughter, so you hold the handset to her ear and step into the sluice room to give her the small privacy the ward cannot. Through the wired glass you can see the window and the radiator, and on the sill the paper bag of seed you have been meaning to plant since October.

Before the early bell you go out to the staff car park with your coat open. The bed by the bin store is the one you dug in February, and under the frost something has come up anyway. Its stalk is a hand high and its leaves are ragged, and its head hangs toward the dark where the streetlamp is failing, the centre already dense with seed. You stand beside it and count the seconds the lamp takes to go out.

When the sky over the multi-storey finally turns the colour of dishwater, the sunflower lifts its face by slow degrees and faces east, the way you were always told it would. You go back inside. Mrs Pryce is awake and asking. You tell her it is light now, and for once you are not stretching the truth.