Black and grey botanical sunflower tattoo with a stem and two leaves on the upper arm.

Sunflower tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower head with layered petals and a shaded centre sits above a thin stem with two leaves. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with grey shading in the petals and seed head. The black and grey design is set against the skin of a bent upper arm, with a grey top with partly visible lettering in the background.

Botanical Upper arm Sunflower Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the second week of August the sunflowers along the Tenbury Road fence had outgrown the boys who planted them, and you were the only one still bothering to count. Thirty-one heads, each one swung toward the kitchen window of the Haddon place as if the house owed it money. Your mother said the flowers were showing off. You said they were only following the light, which was what you had been doing too, though you had not said that to anyone.

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The bus to Lowestoft left from outside the Co-op at twenty past seven on Thursdays. Mr Haddon had promised you a place on the typing bench at the mill office if you could manage forty words a minute on his old Remington, and you could, though the carriage stuck every third line. The letter had come in June. You had read it so many times the fold had gone soft as cloth. Nobody in Calder Flats had ever written to a girl about her hands.

On the last evening you knelt in the dirt and snapped the largest head off at its thick stalk. The seeds were dark and tight in their spiral, packed like the pleats of a fan. You shook them into a twist of brown paper and pressed it into the lining of your good coat, where it would ride out the night. Your mother watched from the step with a dishcloth in her hands and said nothing, which was how you knew she had seen.

The bus took the long way round by the reservoir. Somewhere past the water you unfolded the paper on your knee and tipped a single seed into your palm. It was no bigger than a fingernail and as black as the print on the page. You thought of the thirty-one heads still turning over the fence in the dark, facing east for a sun that would be up for them by morning, and you closed your fist around the seed and kept it there until Lowestoft came up grey over the rail.