Fine line black tattoo of a dandelion releasing seeds that turn into birds, with script text, across a woman's upper back.

Dandelion and birds with script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion clock sits on the left side of the upper back, with its seeds drifting to the right and becoming small bird silhouettes that rise toward the shoulder. Thin, dark linework forms the dandelion and birds, and a line of handwritten-style script runs beneath the birds. The tattoo is black ink on pale skin, and the photo is taken from behind as a bride's corset dress is laced.

Fine line Back Dandelion Bird Script Quote Seed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, settle down, you lot who sat in Ashcombe Lane with the grey jumpers and the cheap sherry at Christmas, because I have been asked to tell the one about Miss Hollis and her jam jar. Forty years ago it sat on the windowsill of Room Four, full of dandelion clocks picked from the cricket pitch. Every dinnertime she'd take one out and blow, and we'd count the breaths it took to strip the stalk bare.

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Mr Pemberton, the caretaker, said the weeds would have the whole field by June. She told him the field had been asked nicely and would sort itself out. Then one wet March the seed heads in the jar began to split, and out of the fluff came small dark shapes that couldn't decide if they were ink or smoke. They flew out the open window before anyone could shut it, rising over the gates in a loose line, each one following the path a seed would have taken.

Here's the bit you won't believe. Every spring after that, a flock of them came back over the school and turned a slow circle above the spire before heading off west. Miss Hollis never once asked us to chase them. She only said, mind you don't hold on to anything that wants to leave.

I went and looked, the summer I left. In the crack of the car park there was a single dandelion, its clock already half gone, and beneath it, scratched into the tarmac with a stick, the line she'd written on the board on her last day: I am flawed if I am not free. Well. Pour me another, Dennis, my throat's gone dry.