Colour tattoo of a sunflower with green leaves and a stem running down the centre of a person's back, with script beside the stem.

Sunflower with script down the spine

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A full-colour sunflower with yellow petals and a brown centre sits at the upper back, with a green stem running down the spine. Two green leaves are shaded with soft gradients, and a line of fine script follows the stem, partly legible as a quotation. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph of bare skin with the subject centred in the frame.

Botanical Realism Back Sunflower Stem Leaf Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the kettle's only just boiled and the gulls have already had the crusts off my plate. You want the story of the yellow flowers on the cliff path? Then you'll hear about Mairead Ross, who had a tongue like a gull's and a heart like a dry-stone wall, and who never once in sixty years turned her face from the sea.

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The flowers came off a ship from Lisbon in the year the herring failed. A sailor called Tobin Vane traded a sack of seed for a night's lodging in her kitchen, and over the peat fire he told her that the sunflower follows the sun from dawn to dusk, so a man lost far out could always find his way home by it. She planted them along the harbour wall that spring. Her son Callum went out in the autumn on the Morag Lee, and the boat did not come back.

Mairead walked up the cliff path each morning and each evening, and the flowers turned with her, east and then west, the way they'd been told. Every August she saved the seed heads and posted them across the water to anyone on the mainland who had lost a man to the sea. She wrote the same line on every scrap of paper she tucked in the envelope: keep your face to the light and it will find you.

When she died, the village found the whole wall full of heads bowed westward, toward the empty water. The children said the flowers were keeping watch. The old men said it was only the wind. I planted them myself this spring, though, facing the mainland road, in case the boy ever decides to walk back along it. Now mind the step, and take a seed for your pocket.