Colour tattoo of two sunflowers with grey shaded butterflies and green leaves, placed on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers and butterflies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of two sunflowers with dense brown centres and bright yellow petals, bordered by green leaves. Two grey and black butterflies with shaded wings sit over the flowers, with fine detail on the wing veins. The design fills most of the frame against blue fabric on the left, with a small dark ornament just visible at the top edge.

Botanical Realism Thigh Sunflower Butterfly Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The van doors are still ticking as the engine cools, and the sunflowers have already started to nod in their buckets. You count them by the light of the market's sodium lamps, forty-two heads, every one turned east as if it knows where the sun will come from. Gulls argue over a split crate of plums behind the fish hall, and somewhere a radio is playing the football results to nobody.

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Mrs Okafor's order is on the clipboard in her neat capitals: two dozen yellow, no ferns, and the card to be written by you because her hand shakes now. You pick the fullest heads, the ones with centres thick as brown velvet. A grey moth bumps against the strip light above the till, then another, and you realise they must have come in with the Lincolnshire buckets, hiding in the pollen like they've been there all along.

She pays in coins from a purse with a broken clasp and asks whether the moths are real or just a trick of the light. You say they're only the night kind, the sort that come out when the city holds on to its heat. She laughs and says her husband would have argued the difference with you until closing. You write the card as she dictates: 'Still facing the light.' The two moths settle on the rim of the bucket and will not be shaken off.

After she has gone, you find one of them on the card where the ink has dried, opening and closing its wings slowly. You tuck the card into the bouquet, carry it out past the bins, and by the time the sun clears the flats along the river the moths have lifted away, and the sunflowers, still turned east, are the only thing left watching the road.