Black and grey sunflower tattoo with shaded petals and leaves covering the shoulder and upper arm, with a second smaller bloom lower down the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers on a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large sunflower with shaded petals and a dark central disc sits on the top of the shoulder, with a smaller sunflower and several leaves trailing down the upper arm. The linework is fairly bold and the petals and leaves are built up with soft grey shading and some darker accents. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a plain skin background, with a black top visible at the lower edge.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Sunflower Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the bench, the left leg is held on with prayer and not much else. You want the sunflower one. Everybody wants the sunflower one, because it's the only story I have that finishes in a field.

Keep reading

This was in the Fen, after the water had come in over the old roads and the cloud sat so low the children thought grey was the colour of the sky. Ottilie Vane kept the seed in a biscuit tin under the floorboards of the grain store at Wisbech. Every morning her grandson Tobin carried seedlings out on a barrow to the ridge by the sea wall and turned each head to the east, because that was how sunflowers had always been, from the old pictures: faces on the sun from first light to last.

Then the council raised a lamp on the tower at the wall, a great yellow thing run off a wind engine, and switched it on at dusk and dawn so the boats could find the channel. Tobin noticed the heads had stopped waiting for the sun. They leaned toward the tower instead, stiff and keen, and by midsummer the whole ridge stood bent toward that one bright splinter of the world like a congregation. He wrote to the council about it. Nobody wrote back.

The lamp failed in the first hard frost. Tobin went out with the barrow expecting ruin and found the flowers still turned toward the dark tower, heavy and patient, every face holding its place. He stood among them a long while. Then he set the barrow down, knelt in the cold, and turned them one by one toward the east, where the grey was beginning to thin. Mind the bench, I said. There's a nail in it.