Black and grey tattoo design of a dandelion seed head dissolving into a flock of birds, shown as a standalone drawing with no body placement.

Dandelion seed head turning into birds

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A dandelion on a long single stem sits at the lower left, its seed head breaking apart into small bird silhouettes. The birds rise and scatter up and to the right across a plain white background, shrinking in size as they move away. The design uses solid black silhouettes for the birds and a dark centre with fine radiating lines and tiny dots for the seed head, with no colour.

Botanical Blackwork Dandelion Bird Seed head Flight Silhouette Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come under the awning, you're dripping on my good oilcloth. Yes, it's raining, it's always raining on Tuesdays in Ashgrove, that's the market's one real rule. Now listen. There was a lad called Tobias Greave who sold cough drops off a trestle by the fish hall, and every morning he passed the old woman who sold dandelion clocks from a tin bucket.

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She charged a penny a head, and she'd say, blow once and wish, and she never let anyone blow twice. Tobias had a sister in the workhouse on Carrow Lane, so he wished every week, blow after blow, until the clocks were bald and the bucket rang empty. Nobody had told him that a wish spent on a dandelion goes up into the air and doesn't come back down.

The rain came on hard that Tuesday, the sort that bounces off the cobbles and soaks through your collar. He stood under the fish-hall eaves with his last clock, one grey ball on a thin green stalk, and he didn't blow. He held it out to the sky and let the wind pick it apart. Out of the seeds came starlings, dark and quick, rising over the slates in a loose scatter, smaller and smaller until the last of them was a fleck over the chimney pots.

The sister walked out of that workhouse in the spring, and Tobias never sold another clock. The stall's still there, see, third from the end, where the rain runs off the canvas in a little silver rope. Now, who's buying the cough drops? Tuesday's the day for it.