Coloured flash drawing of a dandelion clock with seeds drifting away on the breeze, shown without a body placement.

Dandelion seed head releasing seeds

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A dandelion seed head on a long curved stem, with individual seeds breaking free and drifting up and to the right. The linework is bold black with soft shading in teal and green on the seed head and yellow glow behind the seeds. The composition is open, with the stem sweeping down from the bottom left and the seeds scattered across the upper right against a plain white background.

Botanical Traditional Dandelion Seed Seed head Stem Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, you're letting the cold in. No, not that bench, the one under the lamp where the light goes yellow. There. Now listen, because I only tell this once a winter, and only when the streets are empty enough to hear it.

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There was a dandelion clock that grew in the crack beside the tram stop on Harrow Lane, no bigger than a thumb when it started. Every night the trams rattled past and shook its head, and every night it held on. By the time the frost came it was a great pale globe, and the seeds inside had made up their minds. They could see the chimneys over the wall and the lit windows stacked up like matchboxes, and they wanted to be up there among them.

So one still evening, when the streetlamps had all hummed on together, the old clock leaned into the air and let them go. Forty-one seeds, the woman who kept the bus shelter counted, though nobody believed her. They went up past the glow, past the bunting over the chip shop, over the tin roofs. Some caught on the wires and some dropped into the gutters and were swept off by the rain.

The stem did not go anywhere. It stood in its crack all winter with its head gone bare, bending a little more each time the wind came round the corner. Then one morning in March a tram driver stopped to scrape ice off his windscreen and saw a single seed on the wire above him, shining wet, still holding on. He never told anyone what he wished. That's the trick of it, see. You let go, and what you're left holding is only the stalk. Now blow, go on. I'll wait.