Colour realism tattoo of two sunflowers with grey shaded leaves and stems running down the side of the ribs.

Two sunflowers with leaves on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two sunflowers with yellow petals and dark brown centres are stacked vertically, joined by dark stems and shaded grey leaves. The petals are rendered with soft gradients and highlights, and the seed heads have fine dotted texture. The design wraps along the side of the torso, with the upper flower at the top of the frame and the lower one near the hip.

Realism Botanical Ribs Sunflower Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the ward at St Aldric's could say who had first planted the sunflowers outside the window of bay six, only that they had come up every summer since the war and that they faced east without being asked. Nurse Mair Penhallow had worked nights for eleven years and she knew the flowers the way she knew the drip stands, by their habits. At four in the morning they were still dark heads bowed on thick stalks, and the grey leaves hung limp in the streetlamp.

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The night the old farmer came in with his chest full of water, he asked her to open the blind. She told him it was three o'clock and there was nothing out there but the car park. He said his wife had grown those flowers from seed in a tin bath and that they would wait for him to see them turn. Mair pulled the blind up anyway, because it was easier than arguing with a man who was dying.

By five the petals had lifted at the edges, one stalk and then the next, and the big dark centres had swung round to the glass like a row of faces. The farmer lay with his eyes open and said that was the sun coming, and that the flowers had always known before the clocks did. He went quiet before the light reached the car park. Mair left the blind up, and when the day shift came in they found the sunflowers turned full to the window, and nobody on the ward ever moved them.