Black and grey realistic tattoo of a bird in flight carrying a dandelion seed head in its beak, placed on the upper back.

Bird carrying a dandelion seed head

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings and a forked tail flies to the left, holding a dandelion seed head in its beak. Small seeds drift away below it, drawn with fine dark lines. The bird is shaded with soft greys and fine feather detail, and the dandelion is drawn in dark linework on pale skin.

Realism Botanical Back Bird Dandelion Seed Flight Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows had gone south by October, so when a bird turned up in the lean-to on the morning the frost first held the ruts, Dad said it was a sparrow with ideas. It was grey underneath and blue-black along the back, with a tail split like a pair of snips, and it had something in its beak that looked at first like a twig.

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It was a dandelion clock, bent and half torn, pulled from the verge by the gate where Gran used to make us blow for wishes. Mum said birds didn't carry seed for fun. I said maybe it was carrying our wishes south where it was warm, and she laughed at me the way she did when I was nine and certain of everything.

The bird wouldn't settle. It flew the length of the yard, then out over the top field, and on the far side of the hedge I found a line of seeds lying on the snow, each one a little black stalk with its fine crown pulled apart, as if someone had written a message in pins and wanted it read. I followed them until the lane bent and lost them under the hawthorn, and I stood there with my boots soaking through, pretending I wasn't cold.

In April the verge came up gold. Dad went through it with the tractor and then stopped, switched off the engine, and walked the rest of the way round by hand so the blades wouldn't touch them.