Black and grey sunflower tattoo with stippled dotwork centre and shaded leaves on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower with leaves on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sunflower with a large dotwork centre and radiating linework petals sits at the centre of the design, flanked by four shaded leaves. The work uses black ink and grey tones, with stippling in the centre rings and hatched shading on the leaves. The design is centred on the inner arm and fills the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Sunflower Leaves 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

Sit closer, you, and mind the lantern, it smokes when the wind comes off the Hollin. No, I'll not tell it the quick way. The quick way is how the miller's boy tells it, and he gets half of it wrong and all of the sunflower.

Keep reading

The sunflower grew at the forest edge beyond Crabb's Stile, where the last oaks gave way to the wheat. A widow named Ada Pell kept bees there and a patch of seed her husband had brought back from over the sea. Every morning the great head of it turned on its stalk to follow the sun over the ridge, and the bees went round with it, and the village said the thing had no sense and no shame.

One dry August the sun stayed behind the ridge for nine days, so the story goes, and the flower stood facing east anyway, waiting, its petals curling in like a hand held shut. Ada sat beside it each evening with a cup of cold tea and told it the news from the mill: who had married, who had buried, which hens had gone missing. On the ninth night she said the thing she had not said to anyone, that she was tired of waiting too.

Then the rim of the sun came over the ridge, and the flower turned, slow as a clock hand, and every petal lit at once. Ada laughed out loud, the first time in a year, and the old folk say the bees have been dancing that same turn ever since. Mind, that's what they say. Now give me your cup, and go home before the owls start.