Black ink drawing of three birds in flight above two dandelion clocks, with seeds drifting upward across a white background.

Birds and dandelion seeds design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of three birds in flight, with a fourth bird shown in silhouette near the top, above two dandelion clocks at the bottom. Loose seeds with fine radiating strands drift diagonally up the page between the birds and the flowers. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with no greys or colour, set against a plain white background.

Bird Dandelion Seed Flight Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover had the tin open before I finished my sentence. Under a folded square of kitchen roll lay four dandelion clocks, slightly squashed, picked that morning from the verge behind my aunt's flat in Calais. 'They're only weeds,' I said, which was true, and also beside the point. He held one up to the strip light and the seeds shivered on their fine white strands as if they meant to lift off.

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Aunt Marthe had pressed the tin into my hands the night before, the lid taped shut. 'Blow them off the cliffs,' she said. 'Your mother always said the wind up there goes straight across to Kent.' I did not tell her that my mother had been dead nine years, or that the cliffs were a long way from the sea I could see from her window. I only nodded, the way you do when someone has decided a thing for both of you.

The officer asked me to step aside. He had a clipboard and the face of a man who had seen every kind of smuggling and none of it had involved dandelions. A woman in the next queue watched me with the patience of someone who had been travelling since dawn. When he finally waved me on, he handed the tin back and said, 'Mind they don't get in the vents.'

Outside, the wind came off the Channel hard enough to flatten the grass. I took the lid off and lifted the tin. The seeds went out sideways in a loose line, climbing past the car park towards the chalk, until they were neither seeds nor quite birds, just pale marks against the grey, going the way Marthe said the wind would go.