Black ink botanical drawing of sunflowers, roses, buds and leaves on white paper, with a hand holding a brush at the edge of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers and roses in black ink

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A dense arrangement of two sunflowers, two open roses, closed buds and layered leaves drawn in black ink on white paper. The petals and leaves use fine hatched linework, while the sunflower centres are built up with stippled dots. The composition fills the frame diagonally, with a hand holding a brush at the lower right.

Botanical Dotwork Sunflower Rose Bud Leaf Flower Bouquet

Find an artist for this

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

Every September the old apple man walked the rows at Hollin Farm with a bag of dots on his belt, counting the sunflowers that had gone to seed. His granddaughter Maud followed him with a pot of ink and a split quill, because the saying went that the orchard would not give up its fruit unless someone had drawn every bloom in it first.

Keep reading

She had drawn the roses at the gate, the open ones with their layered petals curling like unwrapped letters, and the closed buds beside them, and the broad leaves that held the rain. The sunflowers were harder. Their faces were full of small hungry seeds, and she could only fill them by pressing the quill down again and again until the paper looked like a night sky with the stars spilled out.

On the last evening of August a stranger came up the lane with a brush in his hand and no luggage at all. He wanted to see the drawing. Maud showed him, and he studied the centre of the second sunflower for a long while, then said the seeds were counted wrong, there were three hundred and eleven, not three hundred and twelve. She laughed and told him nobody counted that. He said the orchard did.

In the morning the trees were heavy and the sunflowers had turned to the east, and the stranger was gone, but the paper lay on the table with one extra dot pressed beside the last seed, fresh and wet. Maud never learned which of them had put it there, and she kept the drawing folded in the apple loft, where it still smelled of ink and fruit.