Black and grey botanical tattoo design of two sunflowers with leaves and acanthus scrolls running vertically, drawn as a line sketch with shading.

Sunflowers and acanthus scrolls design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of two sunflowers, one smaller near the top and one larger in the centre, joined by stems and leaves. Acanthus-style scrolls and curled foliage wind around the flowers and extend to the top and bottom of the composition. The drawing uses dark outlines with grey pencil-like shading on the petals, seed heads and leaves, set on a plain white background.

Botanical Sunflower Flower Leaf Scroll Acanthus Stem Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stern gallery of the Marguerite Roe is due on Thursday, and the owner wants his name in gold under the scrolls, so you sit on an upturned crate in the drying shed with a chisel in one hand and cold tea in the other. Outside, gulls are fighting over the fish boxes on the quay. Your mother's sunflowers stand along the yard wall, taller than the gate, their heads bent as if they are listening to someone far off.

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Mr Pascoe at the chandlery said acanthus, the Greek leaf that curls back on itself, the kind they carve on the churches up the hill. You have cut it for thirty years and never thought of it as anything but a way to fill a corner. This week, though, you find yourself drawing the sunflowers in pencil on the back of a planing sheet, shading the petals thick at the base where the light could not reach, and letting the scrolls wind round them as though the flowers had asked for shelter.

On Wednesday the wind came off the water hard, and you walked down in your coat to check the ties on the hull. The sunflowers were flat in the mud, every head turned towards the harbour mouth, where a single lamp burned on the breakwater. Someone had left it lit for a boat that was not coming in. You stood there a long time, then went back for the carving knife.

By morning the stern was finished. Two blooms rose out of the scrolls, the larger set low where the rudder would turn beneath it, and the leaves ran up the transom like a stair. You painted nothing gold. You left the wood pale and let the grain show through the petals, the way sun comes through a hedge in August, and when the owner came he ran his thumb along the curl and said it looked as though it would follow the boat home.