Colourful sunflower tattoo with loose black outlines on the upper arm, with red, yellow, green and orange petals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour sunflower on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sunflower with a dotted brown centre and petals in red, yellow, green and orange. Sketchy black linework outlines the petals, and the colour washes bleed past the edges in a loose, painterly way. The flower sits centrally on the arm against a dark red top.

Upper arm Sunflower Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Pennock had kept the seed packet in her apron pocket since the spring a travelling painter came through Harrowby Cross on a borrowed bicycle. He had painted the old bridge in watercolour, then left a tin of paints on the post office step with the lids rusted shut. Nobody claimed them, and Maud did not say what she had paid him for the seed.

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She pressed it into the dark soil behind the chapel wall in May, and by August the plants stood taller than the vicar. Their heads were wide as dinner plates, dotted brown in the middle like a thumbprint of ink. Children came to look at them. Then they noticed the flowers turned, not toward the sun the way sunflowers were meant to, but toward whoever walked past the wall carrying some sorrow in their step.

Tom Ashby's wife had gone to her sister's in Leeds with the baby and not come back. He stopped at the wall every evening that September, and the nearest bloom bent its face to him until he stood still. Maud saw it and said nothing. By October the petals had begun to run, the reds bleeding into the yellows and the greens spilling past the leaves like paint left in water, until the whole garden looked as though someone had brushed it with colour and forgotten the outlines.

Tom came back in the first frost with a letter in his coat and a small crate under his arm. He had heard the chapel wall was bright all summer and wanted to see it once more before the ground hardened. The flowers hung low, heavy with seed, and when he knelt among them he found a dry smear of yellow on his thumb, and a sunflower in full colour looking back at him from the stalk.