Realistic colour tattoo of a dandelion clock with drifting seeds on a forearm, set against a blue wash background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion clock on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dandelion clock with loose, drifting seeds is tattooed across the forearm, with its stem and green sepals shown in detail. The seeds are rendered with fine, pale linework and soft shading, and the head fades into a blue wash behind it. Warm skin tones and the blue background dominate the colour palette, and the design is framed centrally on the arm.

Realism Botanical Forearm Dandelion Seed Flower Stem Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm says the sundial by the herb beds has been wrong since Lent, so I have taken to telling the hours myself. Each morning I walk the bank below the south wall where the dandelions seed thickest, pick the tallest clock I can find, and blow. One breath for prime, two for terce. The seeds lift off in their pale little parachutes and drift over the brewhouse roof, and I think of the Abbot's ledger, all those figures that never quite add up.

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Yesterday I got it wrong. The wind came off the Wolds from the wrong side and carried the whole clock straight through the chapel door, and Father Osric swore he had been caught in a snowfall in July. I told him the chapel was simply keeping better time than the rest of us. He did not laugh, but he picked a seed off his sleeve and held it up to the window for a long while, turning it so the light came through the fine white hairs.

I have started a tally in the back of my psalter. Four hundred and twelve clocks so far, each with a small mark beside it, though I could not tell you what the marks are for. Perhaps they are only the places where the wind stopped to rest.

This morning I walked the bank again. The clock I chose had already lost half its seeds to the night, bare and green at the top, and I stood there a while before I blew. Nones, I think. It was nearly noon, and I was content to be late.