Fine line tattoo of a dandelion seed head on a long stem and a small clover beside it, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Dandelion and clover on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion seed head sits at the top of a long, thin curved stem that runs down the upper back. Beside it, a small three-leaf clover on its own short stem adds a second botanical element. The linework is very fine, with light shading in the seed head and soft grey tones in the leaves, set against plain skin with a black bra strap crossing the right side of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Back Dandelion Seed head Clover Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the coal dust on that chair. My grandfather worked the Dunmere pit when the lamps still smelled of tallow, and he told me this on the step of the lamp room, the way I am telling it to you. There was a lad called Tobias Renn who went down the shaft each morning with a tin of bread and no more fear in him than a sparrow has of the wind.

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Every spring the pit-top bank filled with dandelions, gold and then white, and the colliery children picked the seed heads and blew them at the headframe, counting breaths for wishes. Tobias never wished for himself. He wished for the roof to hold. One April his sister Nell, who was seven and fierce, told him a clover with three leaves could find the way out of any hole in the ground. She pressed one flat inside his tin lid with a dab of spit and a prayer. He laughed and took it down anyway.

The fall came in November, on a thin Tuesday. Water broke through the east face and the lamps went out one by one. In the dark Tobias found the tin, found the clover, and smelled the bruised green of it. He followed the cold draught the way the little leaves seemed to lean, up a rise of broken stone to a crack where the air moved. Nell was at the top with a dandelion clock in her fist, blowing the seeds into the wind so the men below would know which way the air ran.

Tobias came up blinking into the grey light. The clover is still in that tin, pressed as thin as a letter, and my grandfather kept it on the mantel until the day he died. Nell never once asked for thanks. She only wanted to know if the seeds had gone far enough.