Black and grey dandelion with drifting seeds and the script quote 'Staring down the barrel of a 45, but I'm alive' across the shoulder and upper chest.

Dandelion and script quote on shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey dandelion head with fine seeds drifting off into small bird-like shapes sits on the upper shoulder, its stem curving down toward the chest. Handwritten script reading 'Staring down the barrel of a 45, but I'm alive' runs across the upper chest beside it. The shading is soft and greyscale, with fine linework in the script and light grey tones in the dandelion head.

Botanical Lettering Shoulder Chest Dandelion Seed Bird Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Ysolde counted the boats back through the harbour mouth every evening, and every evening one fewer came round the point than had gone out. She did not weep in public. She climbed the cliff path with a bucket and a kitchen knife and dug dandelions from the thin soil by the coastguard hut, because the old women said a dandelion clock would tell you which way the sea meant to turn.

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Her son Tomas skippered the Mary Ann. He had gone out in the grey weather before the herring came, and the wind got up behind him. Each night Nan stood on the quay wall and blew on a clock, one breath for each man still at sea. The seeds lifted off the stalk and turned, as they always did, into small dark birds, and the birds went out low over the water toward the fleet as though they knew the way.

On the ninth night only four seeds were left on the head, and she was ready to stop counting. Then the Mary Ann came round the point with her nets empty and her sail torn to ribbons. Tomas said they had been driven onto the Skerry in the dark, and a flock of small birds had circled the mast until the tide lifted them clear and the channel showed white on their left hand.

Nobody in the harbour ever asked Nan why she kept the bare stems in a jar beside her door. She never told them the seeds had only been doing what seeds do, going where the wind was willing to take them and coming home when it was not.