Black and grey botanical tattoo of two sunflowers with leaves on the upper arm, below a grey t-shirt sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two sunflowers, one larger and one smaller, sit on the upper arm with a stem and broad leaves running down towards the elbow. The linework is dark and detailed, with shaded petals and seed heads built up from fine marks. The photograph is in black and white, so the tattoo appears entirely in black ink and grey tones.

Botanical Upper arm Sunflower Flower Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed heads were already heavy on the Thursday Dennis finally let Nell cut the first of them, the big one nodding over the sea wall as if it had been waiting for the boats to come in. "Not with the kitchen knife," he said. "Use the good one, the one with the bone handle." She didn't argue. Everyone in Porthkelly knew the sunflowers on the allotment plot were his and his late wife's, grown every summer from the same tin of seed, and that nobody touched them before the first frost.

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Nell carried the bloom down the harbour steps in both arms, its heavy face bumping against her chin. The fishermen mending nets on the slipway looked up and then looked away again, the way men do when a thing is too big to comment on. Her uncle's smaller plant, the one he called the runt, had bent almost double against the stone during the gale, and its neighbour leaned over it protectively, leaves spread wide like a pair of hands.

Back at the cottage they spread the seeds on newspaper across the kitchen table, counting them in twos because counting in ones made Dennis lose his place. The paper was the local one, still showing last month's lifeboat launch. "Your aunt used to say the flowers were tracking the sun," he said, pressing a thumb into the mass of seeds. "Turning all day, east to west. Stubborn things." Nell laughed. "Like you."

He didn't laugh, but he pushed a jar across the table. Inside were forty seeds, dried and dark as ink. "Plant them on the wall facing the water," he said. "Next year you'll have your own pair to fight over." She screwed the lid down tight and held it up to the window, where the late light caught the striped shadows of the leaves on the glass.