Black ink tattoo of small birds flying away from a dandelion seed head on the side of a bare abdomen, above the waistband of denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds flying from a dandelion on the abdomen

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a flock of small black bird silhouettes rising and drifting towards the left, with a dandelion clock at the lower right of the design. The dandelion seeds are drawn with fine, delicate strokes, while the birds are solid dark shapes. The ink is black on pale skin against a dark background, with a navel piercing and denim waistband in the frame.

Fine line Other Bird Dandelion Seed Flying bird

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The count had to be done before the cloud came down over Gallow Scar, and my grandfather had never once let me miss it. He sat on the wall at the top of the pass with the tally book open on his knee and a pencil behind his ear, and he said the swallows were the easy ones. The hard ones were the small dark birds that rose out of the valley in ragged lines, as if someone had scattered them from a hand.

Keep reading

That autumn he was too stiff to climb, so I took the book up alone. Below me the becks ran white and the bracken had gone the colour of rust. On the path near the cairn a dandelion clock stood on its thin stalk, grey and perfect, its seeds ready to go. I bent to blow it the way he had taught me, one breath for each year we had been counting, and the wind took the seeds up in a long bright spill. Somewhere past the first ridge they turned into birds.

I know how that sounds. I wrote it down anyway, under the day's heading, because the book was for what I saw and not for what I wished. Fourteen birds went over the gate towards the western fells. Eleven came back the following spring, thinner and quarrelsome, and sat on the wall beside my grandfather until he could no longer lift his hand to count them.

I carried the book down before the fog. At the kitchen table I ruled a new line and wrote the total, then left the space beside it empty, the way he always had for the ones that had not yet decided where to land.