Colour tattoo of a sunflower with green leaves and a black outline in a watercolour-style wash, placed on the outer thigh.

Watercolour-style sunflower on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large sunflower with orange petals and a brown centre sits atop a tall green stem with several broad leaves, all drawn with thin black linework. The petals and leaves use soft, translucent orange and green washes that bleed past the outlines, giving a painted watercolour look. The design is centred on the skin of the upper leg and fills most of the frame against a pale towel background.

Botanical Thigh Sunflower Flower Leaves Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed packet split along one corner somewhere past the Azores, so every pocket in my oilskin held a little drift of grit. Mrs Okonedo at the chandlery in Falmouth had pressed it into my palm the morning we sailed. "Dark heads, tall as a mast," she'd said. "Plant them where the sun comes first and they'll follow it round all day." I laughed, the way you laugh at a woman who sells rope and sells advice along with it.

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The cook let me have a tin with a cracked lid and a scoop of soil from the flour barrel's ledge. Twelve seeds went into the tin and sat on the galley sill, facing the port scuttle where the light came in low and yellow every morning. By the Canaries the nearest one had split and sent up a white thread no thicker than a bootlace. Bosun Pryce said it was bad luck to grow anything aboard that wasn't rope or biscuit, but he came down every watch to check on it anyway.

The storm off the Cape of Good Hope took the sill, the tin and most of the seedlings in a single night. I went below at dawn with the bilge still sloshing and found one plant standing, bent flat against the bulkhead but reaching for the scuttle, its leaves torn to ribbons. I wedged it in with a rolled sock and a strip of canvas, and it kept on turning.

We made Fremantle in the autumn with the tin empty but for that one stalk. When the harbour master asked what I was carrying, I told him a sunflower. He laughed and said it had come a long way to look at the wrong sky. I planted it in a bucket on the quay that evening, facing west, and by sundown it had a head the size of a saucer, every petal turned after the light.