Black and grey wildflowers with a red swirling sun and small birds, tattooed across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Wildflowers and red sunburst on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a bunch of wildflowers with stems, leaves and open blooms drawn in black and grey linework and shading, rising from a thin scripted line near the lower back. Behind the flowers, loose red and orange brush-like swirls form a sun or circle, with fine radiating rays and small black birds scattered over the shoulder blade. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph of the upper back with the colour and botanical detail clearly visible.

Botanical Back Shoulder Wildflower Flower Bird Sun Sunburst Script Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds came down the valley the morning Tamsin Oake was still cutting seed from the north terraces. She counted them the way her grandmother had taught her, by threes, because threes were lucky and sevens were for the dead. There were nine. They dropped onto the ridge without fuss and walked among the stalks as if the ground belonged to them.

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Tamsin had kept the wild gardens of Carrow for eleven years, since the pumps failed and the orchards went to brambles. Her people said the red sun that rose behind the hill each spring was the same sun their grandparents had seen before the grey years, only tired now, and that it could be coaxed up by planting what the old books called weeds. Poppies for sleep, cornflowers for the bees, yellow hawkweed in the cracks of the walls. A bunch of them, bound at the stem and hung over a doorway, would bring the light back faster.

The birds took seed from her palm and left three grey feathers in the furrow, which was a sign the sun would hold. But Ewan Strey, the youngest of the village and unable to sit still, climbed the ridge that evening to see where they roosted. He came down at dusk with a torn scrap of paper and a face like he had swallowed a bee. Faded ink ran across it in a crooked hand: to resist despair is to keep planting. He read it aloud twice. Tamsin folded it into her apron pocket and said the sun would rise regardless, which was what she had always said. This time she believed it.

In the morning the red ring climbed over Carrow Hill as it always had, and the birds spread out across the valley, each one carrying a single seed toward the places that had gone quiet. Tamsin knelt among the flowers with her hands in the soil and waited for the first warm light to reach her shoulders.