Colour sunflower tattoo with two bees on the ribs and upper abdomen, shown with a lifted blue shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower with bees on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large sunflower with yellow and orange petals, a grey stippled centre and green leaves sits on the ribs, with two small black and yellow bees beside it. The petals are outlined in black and shaded in yellow and orange, and the leaves are green with darker shading, set against a soft blue wash behind the flower. The photograph is cropped to the torso with the sunflower centred and the wearer's shirt held open.

Traditional Botanical Ribs Sunflower Flower Leaves Bee

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

The bees found the south wall before you did, which is how you knew the sunflowers had seeded themselves in the old kitchen garden again. Nobody had planted them since the siege. Mrs Pryce at the lodge swore the castle was cursed, but she also swore the swallows nested in the chapel to spite the bishop, so you took her word with a pinch of salt and climbed the broken stair with a jar of comb wrapped in a tea towel.

Keep reading

The keep had no roof now, only a ring of blackened beams and a sky that poured straight down onto the flagstones. The flowers stood taller than the bread oven. Their heads turned slowly all morning, following a sun that never seemed to reach the ground, and by noon they had stopped looking at the sky and started looking at you. The bees walked over their petals like tiny sentries in yellow and black, and they did not sting, not once, not even when you pressed your thumb into a cell to test the honey.

Your grandfather said a sunflower remembers every day it has been watched. He said it the way he said most things, halfway out of a doze, and you had never believed him. Still, you left the comb on the warm step of the chapel for the bees, and you carried one head, heavy as a lamp, down the stairs to the lodge.

Mrs Pryce looked at it for a long time. Then she took the jar, sniffed it, and said nothing about curses. You walked home with the sunflower under your arm and the light behind you, and when you looked back from the gate, every face in the castle garden had turned to follow you.