Colour tattoo of a large orange sunflower with water droplets on its petals, set against a teal sky and brown soil with roots, on a forearm.

Sunflower with sky on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large orange sunflower fills most of the forearm, with a green stem and leaves running down to exposed roots in brown soil at the base. Its petals have soft shading and small raised water droplets, and the seed head is rendered in greys and browns. Behind the flower is a teal sky with pale pink clouds, and the whole piece is in full colour with smooth blended shading.

Botanical Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal Stem Leaves Sky Cloud Root Water droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You carry the seed tin up the cliff path on the third morning after the rain, because rain is the only thing the island has ever handed you without a queue. Gulls lift off the chapel roof as you pass. Your grandmother's trowel knocks against the tin in your coat pocket with every step, and the wind keeps trying to take your hat over the edge toward Skerry Sound.

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The soil is thin up here, a brown skin laid over grey rock, and when you dig, old marram roots come away in pale knots like clenched fists. You press the seed in with your thumb, deeper than the instructions say, because wind strips the top off anything lying loose. Nobody on the island has grown a sunflower in forty years. Mrs Harrow says salt air will kill it by Whitsun. You water it from the bottle you filled at the spring, and you do it again the next morning, and the next.

By midsummer it stands taller than the gate, its face as wide as a dinner plate, and every morning it turns to follow the ferry's wake out past the breakwater. Rain from the night before still clings to the petals where they curl, and the small children come up the path to look at the drops before school, as if they might roll off and be lost.

The ferry leaves in August with you on it, your bag stuffed with someone else's fishing wire and a letter for an aunt in Aberdeen. From the stern you watch the island shrink to a green thumbprint on the sea. The flower is still there, the highest thing on the headland, and its face is turned toward the boat. A single drop catches the light on its nearest petal and holds it, bright as a coin, until the swell carries you past the point.