Black and grey botanical tattoo of sunflowers, peonies and leaves covering the shoulder and upper arm of a woman in a floral dress.

Sunflowers and peonies on an upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with two large sunflower heads, a full peony and smaller flowers with leaves. The design is drawn in dark outline with shading in the petals and centres, and it is shown in black ink and grey tones. The photograph is a black and white side view that crops the subject's face out of frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Sunflower Peony Flower Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the Folkestone barrier turned the cardboard tube over in his gloved hands and asked what it held, and you told him pressed flowers, which was true in the way most useful things are true. Beneath the tissue paper and the faded card lay forty sunflower seeds sealed in a square of oilcloth. They were the last of the strain your grandfather had coaxed on the slope above the Medway, heads as wide as dinner plates, dark-centred and ringed with petals like a crowd leaning in to hear something.

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Behind you the queue of lorries breathed diesel into the grey morning. Marguerite had insisted the peonies should be the decoy, their roots packed in damp moss and labelled with the name of a nursery that closed in 1998, and you had let her win the argument because she was the one who would cry if they were lost. The officer's sniffer dog trotted past the boot, sat by the wheel arch and looked at you with the patient disappointment of a creature that had smelled nothing worth reporting.

He lifted the tube to the light, eased off the cap and tipped one seed into his palm. For a long moment he studied it the way you might study a letter in a language you once spoke. "My mother grew these behind our house in Lille," he said. "She called them the sun's little dinner plates." He pressed the seed back into your hand and waved the car forward.

On the far side, in a field of wet clay above Honfleur, you dug the first hole with a borrowed spade and dropped the seed in. The sunflowers that came up in July turned their faces every morning toward the coast you had just crossed.