Black and grey botanical tattoo of sunflowers wrapping around a forearm, with a striped sleeve pushed up and a white dog in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers wrapping a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several sunflowers with large seed heads and layered petals, wrapping around the forearm towards the wrist. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading on the petals and seed centres. The image is taken at an angle with warm lighting, and a striped sleeve and a small white dog appear in the background.

Botanical Forearm Sunflower Flower Petal Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at the field outside Maidstone the week the sunflowers come into seed, and Mrs Pargeter is already shouting at the generator. The fair has been on the road since April, and the only thing that has never moved is the row of sunflowers she grows behind the dodgems, staked with broom handles and tied with baler twine. "Don't let them dry out," she says, handing you a bucket as if it were a sacrament. You learn to water at dusk, when the heads swing back from the last of the sun.

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Every town you pull into, the heads are bigger. Their faces hold the seeds in spirals, packed tight as fingerprints, and the tent men lay bets on how many you'll count. You count with a hatpin on the back of a raffle ticket and lose track at four hundred, which Mrs Pargeter says is the only honest answer anyone has ever given her. The petals fan out in layers, like the skirts of the dancers on the old posters she keeps folded in the caravan, and at night the whole row looks like a crowd turned politely towards the Ferris wheel.

In October a grey car pulls up at the gate, and a man in a good coat walks the length of the field without looking at the rides. Mrs Pargeter gives you the biggest head that evening, cut low and wrapped in a tea towel. "Plant it somewhere the lights won't reach," she says, and then she goes back to the caravan and does not come out.

You drive the van north with the seed head on the passenger seat. Somewhere past Rochester you pull into a lay-by on the A20, dig a hole with a tyre iron, and press the head into the verge. Lorries sweep their headlights across it all night. By morning, when you go back for the bucket you forgot, it has already turned its face to the road.