Black and grey botanical tattoo of sunflowers, a peony and smaller blooms with leaves across a woman's upper arm and shoulder.

Sunflowers and peony on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a woman's upper arm and shoulder, with her face outside the frame. The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with two large sunflowers, a full peony and smaller five-petalled flowers, joined by leaves. The work uses bold black outlines with light grey shading inside the petals and leaves, on a soft, evenly lit background with a floral dress.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Sunflower Peony Flower Leaves Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't shake that tin, Bea, you'll wake the sunflowers before the soil's ready. Mum had kept them in the biscuit tin since August, wrapped in a tea towel that smelt of vinegar, and she handed it to me across the potting bench as though it were a live thing. Outside, the allotment fence leaned into the wind off the reservoir, and the peony bed by the gate had already dropped its heavy heads in July.

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The peony had taken three summers to flower. Dad planted it the year I left for Leeds, a bare root in a bucket, and swore on the shed key it would never bloom. Then it did, one May, a ball of cream and blush so full the stems bowed to the path. He cut the first bloom and brought it indoors in a jam jar, and the kitchen smelt of rain for a week.

Mum said the sunflowers were the stubborn ones. They came up thin and crooked along the south fence, leaning towards the sun as if they had somewhere to be, and every evening she walked the row with a watering can and a bent spoon for the slugs. 'They follow the light all day,' she said, 'and nobody thanks them for it.' I pressed my thumb into the soil beside the first stalk and felt how cool it still was, even in August.

I took the tin home on the train, wrapped in her tea towel, and planted the seeds in the back yard in Headingley the week after. Nothing came up that autumn. The following June a single green spike broke through the cracked slabs, and I stood on the step in my socks until the neighbour asked if I'd lost something. I had not. I'd found it.