Colour tattoo of a sunflower with orange petals and a dark centre, outlined in black and red sketchy lines, with blue watercolour splashes, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflower with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large sunflower fills the upper forearm, with layered orange and yellow petals around a dark brown seed head. Black and red sketchy linework outlines the petals and extends beyond the flower, and soft blue washes run down towards the wrist. The colour is vivid against the pale skin, and the dark background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal Watercolour splash Linework

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, same as the last man's promises. Sit where you can see the water. My grandfather's boat was called the Marigold Ann, though nobody in Staithes called her anything but the Yellow Hen, because her paint had gone the colour of old eggs by August.

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That summer the herring went deep and wouldn't come up for anyone. Six boats went out past the Scar and came back with nets full of weed and nothing else. The men stopped talking at supper. My grandmother, who never held with superstition, went down to the garden wall and pushed a sunflower seed she'd kept in a tin since the Coronation into the cold ground. Everyone laughed. Sunflowers in a Yorkshire gale, they said.

But it grew. Forty stalks of it along the wall, and every morning the heads swung round to face the harbour mouth like a row of wives waiting on the quay. My grandfather said flowers didn't know where boats were. Then one dawn he went down to find the flowers had turned east, and so did the Hen, and the shoal was lying in the blue water under the Scar as thick as a carpet.

He came home with the hold full and his cap on backwards. He never did say whether it was the flowers or the tide. He just pulled a dried head off the wall, pressed it into my palm, and told me to stand where the sun could see me in the morning.