Colour and black ink tattoo of a dandelion, music notes, two orange butterflies and a quote in script across a woman's upper back and shoulder.

Dandelion and music notes with script on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A dandelion seed head with drifting seeds sits to the right of a handwritten quote reading Best friends on Earth, make the best angels in Heaven. Floating music notes and two orange butterflies complete the design, with a green stem curling into a loop at the base. The linework is dark and crisp, with soft shading on the dandelion head and greens used for the stem.

Botanical Lettering Shoulder Dandelion Music note Butterfly Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm taught me the neumes the winter the cloister wall cracked, when the abbot said we would sing in the frost-house until the mason came. Anselm could never hold a note steady. He sang like a man carrying too many buckets, and I loved him for it, because the rest of us sang as though we were auditioning for God.

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Our friendship was a matter of small things: he saved me the heel of the bread, and I copied his scores into the margins of my psalter. When the fever came up from the river in June, he asked me to write down the tunes he hummed in the infirmary, and I did, badly, on the back of a land ledger. On the last afternoon he lifted a dandelion clock from the herb bed and blew, and the seeds went out over the wall like a second choir scattering from the loft.

He said, "Best friends on earth make the best angels in heaven, Brother, and I intend to be very good at it." I told him that was blasphemy, and he laughed until the sound broke into coughing.

Now I sing the office with the wrong man's part, and every morning I walk the herb bed looking for seed heads. When I find one I stand very still, because somewhere above the wall there is a bass line I have not yet learned to follow.