Botanical tattoo of three tall sunflowers with black linework, yellow and green colour and roots below soil, on a lower leg.

Three sunflowers with roots on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Three tall sunflowers grow from a band of soil, with their stems, leaves and root systems drawn in black linework. The flower heads are shaded in black with yellow and green ink, and loose orange and yellow splashes sit around the top flower. The design is centred on the lower leg, with the soil line and roots fading into the skin at the bottom of the composition.

Botanical Calf Sunflower Stem Leaves Root Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the draught comes off the hill and finds the back of your neck. You want to hear how the sunflowers crossed the river at Vrbas? Then mind your tea, because I was a girl with a sack of seed, a cough that wouldn't quit, and a guard at the bridge with a dog that had no patience at all.

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Her name was Milena, and she had three seeds left from her mother's last plot. The rest had gone to the winter or been left in the mud of the water meadow when the family ran. The guard asked what she carried. She said bread. He said bread does not rattle. So she tipped the sack out across the wooden table, and the seeds skittered over the boards like black beetles, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the step, and the dog sat down too, out of politeness.

On the far bank she dug a hole with a spoon, pressed the seeds into a rusted biscuit tin of wet earth, and set it on the windowsill of a rented room. Nothing happened for a fortnight. Then one morning there was a green fist pushing up through the soil, and by midsummer the stems had grown past the sill, past the gutter, and out the window into the lane, sending their roots down through the cobbles like they had business under the town.

The guard came back years later, grey now, with a grandson by the hand. He stopped in that lane and looked up at three yellow heads the size of dinner plates, turning slowly after the sun. He said nothing for a long while. Then he said the bread had been very good that day, and Milena told him the seeds had been good too, and the boy asked why the roots went so deep, and nobody gave him an answer he could use.