Colour tattoo of two orange sunflowers with green vines and a partly visible horseshoe on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers and vine across the lower back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

Two orange and yellow sunflowers with grey centres sit on the lower back, joined by green curling vines. The flowers are shaded with soft gradients and defined petal edges, and a partial horseshoe outline appears at the right edge. The composition runs diagonally across the skin, with the larger flower on the left and the smaller one on the right.

Botanical Back Sunflower Vine Horseshoe Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the night ward at St Brannock's believed Mrs Tully's tale about the horseshoe, so Edie Marr kept it to herself until the third night of the storm. The porter's trolley had a wheel that squealed, the rain came sideways off the moor, and the rusted shoe nailed above the linen cupboard had hung there since the old stables became a laundry. Edie had asked once why it was kept. Mrs Tully had said it was for the sunflowers.

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The story went like this. A farmer's daughter in the hills kept two sunflowers in a clay pot on her sill, and each morning they turned their faces to the window to see her go out to the lane. When the fever came up the valley, she carried water to the cottages until her arms gave out. The sunflowers, so the tale says, turned all the way round in the night and faced the dark road, and by morning the fever had gone back down the valley the way it came. A horse was found standing at the gate with a shoe missing, and a new shoe was nailed on the step by someone who never came inside.

At three in the morning Bernard Hale in bed nine asked for his window to be opened, though the sash was painted shut and the wind was loud. Edie wheeled his bed round so he could see the yard. The lamp by the lych gate swung in the gusts, and the heads of the sunflowers in the neighbour's plot were bent hard over, all leaning the same way, towards the hospital.

By six the rain had thinned to nothing. Bernard was asleep with his cheek near the glass, and Edie wrote in the night log under sundry, one horseshoe, still hanging, then went home to sleep with the curtains open.