Pencil sketch design of a dandelion seed head releasing musical notes and a treble clef, in a botanical style, with no body placement shown.

Dandelion seed head with musical notes

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a dandelion seed head on a long thin stem, with seeds that break up into musical notes and a treble clef drifting up and to the right. The linework is light and sketchy with soft grey shading on the stem and seed head. The composition is diagonal on a plain white background, with the notes becoming smaller and sparser as they move away from the flower.

Botanical Dandelion Seed head Musical note Treble clef Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the first tins out before the milk float rattles past the window, and your hands know the dough better than your head does this early. Tilly, the apprentice, is still yawning over the sink. Outside the glass the street is the colour of dishwater, and the dandelion clock in the cracked pot on the sill has gone fully grey overnight.

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Last week you pulled the old ledger from under the till and found Dad's pencil tunes squeezed into the margins of a recipe for bath buns, tiny crotchets and a treble clef he never bothered to rub out. He used to hum while he proved the dough, the same four bars over and over, never reaching the fifth. You had thought the bakery was only bread. Now you hear those four bars every time the oven door clangs shut.

At half five you take the first brew out to the step. The wind has got up off the common and it lifts the dandelion head clean off its stalk, the seeds peeling loose into the grey and turning, one by one, into quavers and semiquavers that climb over the road towards the church. A treble clef rides the top of it all, and you laugh out loud, the sound going up with them.

Back inside, Tilly asks what the joke is. You tell her you have finally got to the fifth bar, and you hum it while you slash the crust on the first loaf, the blade making its quick, neat little song.