Fine line black ink drawing of a dandelion seed head on a long stem, with one seed drifting away, on a plain off-white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seed head with drifting seed

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single dandelion seed head on a slender stem is drawn in delicate black linework, with its fine radiating filaments tipped by small seeds. One seed floats separately at the upper right, suggesting it has been blown loose. The drawing is in black ink on a pale, textured off-white ground with generous empty space around the subject.

Fine line Botanical Dandelion Seed head Seed Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had kept the dandelion clock in a biscuit tin for eleven days, the lid pressed down over a square of damp muslin, because her mother used to say anything carried a long way should arrive looking like itself. By the third week out from Falmouth the seeds had grown restless, shivering whenever the hull groaned under them. Ruth was only the cook's mate on the Mary Calloway and had no business with a tin of weeds, but nobody aboard had ever told her to throw it over.

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On the twenty-second day the wind dropped to nothing and the sea lay flat as a slate. Tobias, the captain's boy, came up the companionway asking to see the seeds, so she lifted the lid on the afterdeck. The air was so still that the filaments hung straight, every seed upright on its fine stalk like a lamp nobody had lit. He held his breath and she held the stem steady between two fingers.

A breath came off the water from nowhere, the way it does on that stretch of ocean when a ship least expects it. One seed lifted free, turned once above the rail, and drifted out over the grey swell towards a coast none of them could see.

Ruth wrote the date on the inside of the tin lid in pencil, then the latitude they had reached, and left the rest of the clock standing bare on its stalk. Somewhere beyond the horizon, she supposed, the seed was still falling.