Mixed colour tattoo of a ribbon with script and dandelion seeds drifting into butterflies on the side of the ribs, in a botanical style.

Awareness ribbon and dandelion on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a ribbon twisting upwards across the side of the ribs, with the script text Will Fight across its width. A dandelion clock at the base releases seeds and small butterflies that drift up towards the top of the design. The ribbon is shaded in soft pink and mauve, while the dandelion and seeds are rendered in grey and dark tones with blue-grey accents.

Botanical Ribs Ribbon Dandelion Seed Butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dandelion clock on the towpath had gone to seed the week the Marigold came up through Cressing Lock, and Ada Vane stopped the boat to look at it. Her father used to say you could tell the hour by how many breaths a clock took to empty. She counted seven from the bank, and the seeds lifted off the water in a grey drift, as if the mist had lost its way home and decided to go up instead.

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Her cousin Jem sat on the roof with a length of pink silk knotted round his wrist, the sort the chapel women sold at the autumn fair for pinning to coats. He had been sent to carry a message to the keeper at Hythe Bridge, but all the way up the cut he had been untying the knot and tying it again. "It only says two words," he said. "I keep thinking I've got them wrong." Ada took the silk from him and read the lettering, faded where the sun had worked on it: Will Fight. She told him that was the right message and he could stop fiddling.

Tobias Crane, the keeper, read the scrap twice, then tied the silk to the paddle gear of his top gate. Every time the water rose and the gate creaked, the ribbon lifted and dropped, and the seeds from the clock caught in its folds. Boats came through and nobody asked what it was for. By the first frost the silk was grey with down and butterflies of rust-coloured dust had settled along its edges.

When the Marigold passed Hythe Bridge the next spring, the silk was still there, though no one could say which thread had been pink. Ada blew once on the dandelion at the lock side, and seven seeds went up over the water towards the trees.