Black and grey botanical tattoo of queen anne's lace, dandelion seed head and dandelion leaves running up the back of a leg, in a fine line and dotwork style.

Botanical wildflowers on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several wild plants: a queen anne's lace flower head at the top, a seed head with a dotted bud, a dandelion clock and dandelion leaves along the lower section. Fine outlines are combined with stippled dotwork for shading on the flower heads and the clock. The composition runs vertically up the skin in greys and black with soft shading on the leaves.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Calf Dandelion Wildflower Seed head Leaves Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woman in lane four had a plastic box on the passenger seat, and when I asked her to open it she didn't argue. Inside, wrapped in kitchen roll, were three paper envelopes labelled in pencil. Queen Anne's lace, she said, and dandelion, and something she called her mother's mistake, which turned out to be a seed head gone to fluff in a jam jar.

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I should have sent her through to the secondary room. The form asks for plant material, and she had nothing that wasn't a weed. I held one envelope up to the strip light. The seeds were grey and tiny, each one with a hair fine as a clock hand. My supervisor, Dev, would have wanted a reference number. I wrote 'wild flora, common, UK origin' and closed the box.

She told me her mother had grown these along a railway embankment in a town she could no longer name, and that the wind had always taken more than it gave back. Behind her a van was honking. I asked whether she wanted the seeds returned to her at the far side. She said she'd rather they went somewhere they would be a nuisance.

She drove on. Later, when the barrier lifted for the next car, a dandelion clock came loose from the fence beside my booth and rolled across the tarmac, shedding itself a little at a time until the wind had the lot. I counted the seeds going over the lorries. I lost count somewhere past the fourth lane.