Black and grey sunflower tattoo with shaded petals and leaves on a person's calf, shown in a casual outdoor setting.

Two sunflowers on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two sunflowers with shaded petals and cross-hatched centres run up the calf, with a few leaves and a stem linking them. The linework is dark and fairly bold, and the petals are filled with grey shading that gives them depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against warm skin, with the lower leg and trainers visible in the frame.

Botanical Calf Sunflower Flower Leaf Stem

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The judge had already moved on to the marrows when Bea Tulley came back down the trestle tables, a knitting needle in one hand and a sunflower head the size of a dinner plate in the other. She had been counting the seeds in the middle since six that morning. Nobody else at the Fenmarsh show bothered, but Len had always said a flower gave its secrets to anyone patient enough to ask.

Keep reading

Len had taught her the spirals on the back step of their council house, the summer the kitchen roof came in. Pick a seed, he said, and follow the curl outwards. Left curve, right curve, always two numbers somewhere between thirty and fifty-five. He had grown tall yellow heads every August for thirty years and lost the Giant Bloom class to Mr Ashdown's boy by a single ribbon, and every August he had told her the middle was the thing that counted.

She found the trouble in the Ashdown entry in the last ten minutes before the bell. A ring of florets had been picked clean by starlings, a neat bald crescent the judge would miss from the front but not from the side. Bea said nothing about it to the judge. She walked over to the boy instead, who was twelve and sunburnt and trying not to cry behind the hay bales, and told him to turn the head a quarter round so the gap faced the hedge.

The Ashdown boy took the blue rosette by a single ribbon, and nobody could say the judge had got it wrong. Bea walked home along the verge with her own flower wrapped in the Fenmarsh Gazette, sat down on the back step, and counted out the seeds one by one onto a saucer for Len's old tin, to be planted where the sun got in.