Bearded man with arms crossed showing black and grey tattoos on both forearms and upper arms, including a sunflower and a bird.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed forearms and upper arms in denim

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bearded man in a short-sleeved denim shirt and light grey jeans stands with his arms folded against a plain wall, cropped below the eyes. Both forearms and upper arms are covered in tattoos, including a sunflower on the upper arm and dark bird-like and leaf motifs, shown in shaded black and grey linework. The composition is a full-length crop with neutral tones that keep attention on the arm tattoos.

Botanical Forearm Upper arm Sunflower Bird Leaves Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crows had found the sunflowers before my father had finished cursing them. Nine heads he'd coaxed up the harbour wall that summer, grown from seed he kept in a tobacco tin, and by the second week of September the big faces had bowed and the seed was going black with birds. He stood at the kitchen window with his tea going cold and said the crows were thieves with better manners than the council.

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I took the old fishing net down from the shed and pegged it over the bed, the mesh grey with salt and smelling of tar. Dad watched from the step, arms folded, and said nothing, which from him was approval. The birds came anyway, big-shouldered and patient, walking the wall as if they owned the rope. One of them, a rook with a notch in its wing, sat on the gatepost each morning and looked at the net as though it were a question.

By October the heads were empty and papery, and the leaves had gone the colour of wet slate. I cut them down one by one and laid them on the quay for the wind to take. Dad came down with the tin in his hand, the lid rusted shut, and tipped it over the stones. A dozen seeds rolled out, dark and striped. "Leave a few for the thieves," he said. "They've earned their winter."

The rook was gone by spring. The next August, a single sunflower came up through a crack in the harbour wall, too tall and crooked to be anything but ours, and it turned its face to the water every morning as if it were waiting for a boat.