Sunflower tattoo on upper back

Spring of '58, a woman stepped off the Thursday local carrying a brown paper bag and a suitcase tied shut with washing line. She asked for the gate to the spare ground behind the coal bunker. Her father had grown sunflowers on an allotment in Derby until the council took it, she said, and the seeds in that bag were black and striped like a badger's back. She pressed them into the cinders with her thumb, one at a time, and nobody stopped her, because the line was shut for signalling that week and there was nothing else to do.

By August they stood higher than the signal box, heads as wide as a dinner plate, and every one of them turned to follow the sun from the east end of the platform to the west. By evening the whole length of the halt looked like a row of faces waiting for a train. The petals went yellow as a brass lamp. The middles, when the florets opened, were a deep teal, like the canal under the bridge at dusk, and the bees went into them as if they'd been sent for. Inspector Pell came out in his good shoes to say a railway was no place for a garden. He stopped mid-sentence when he saw them.

The woman never came back. All that stayed behind was her suitcase, left in the lamp room with a luggage label reading Lily. Every summer since, I keep back the biggest head from the row and hand its seeds to whoever gets off the Thursday local with a paper bag. I don't ask where they're headed. Sunflowers know which way the light is, and that's enough for the both of us.