Black and grey script tattoo on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with swirling lines, small birds drifting from a dandelion seed head.

Dandelion, birds and script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on a person's upper back, with a dandelion at the lower right whose seeds turn into small birds and swirling wisps. Two lines of cursive script run through the swirls, and the linework is fine and dark with soft grey shading behind the wisps. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the design is centred on the shoulder blade area.

Lettering Botanical Back Dandelion Bird Swirl Script Seed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy had been promised a dandelion clock and he wanted it now, so Ruth Coyle fished the last few from the bucket under her trestle while rain drummed on the tarpaulin above Cathedral Market. The stems were limp and the heads had gone grey at the edges. She held one out anyway and told him to blow it hard enough to count to ten, which was what Dennis used to tell the children on the canal path every April, when he came home with his coat full of verge weeds and wet knees.

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Dennis had gathered them for her too, for thirty-one springs. He would stand in the kitchen doorway and blow a clock across the room until she laughed at him for scattering seed on the lino. Since March she had not picked up a single one. The stall still sold them because the regulars asked, and she still wrapped them in brown paper, but she did not look at them properly.

The boy puffed. The seeds lifted off the stalk in a slow, untidy rush, caught the wind coming under the roof, and swirled out over the stalls in loose curls. A few hung in the grey light, and Ruth could have sworn they had little wings, quick and dark, though the pigeons on the gutter were not moving. The boy shrieked and ran after them into the wet.

Ruth watched until the last of them had gone over the railings towards the river. Then she took the empty stem from the bucket, dried it on her apron, and carried it home in her pocket. It sits on the windowsill now, where the rain cannot get at it.