Black ink line drawing of a dandelion with seeds blowing away and the Portuguese script 'a vida é bela', a fine line botanical lettering design.

Dandelion seeds and 'a vida é bela' script

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a dandelion head on a long curved stem, with several seeds drifting off to the upper right. The Portuguese script 'a vida é bela' runs diagonally beneath the seeds in a flowing hand. The linework is thin and uniform in black ink on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Botanical Lettering Dandelion Seed Script Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, where the lamp doesn't reach. Mariana's father swept this floor every Saturday for forty years, and he used to say a dance hall is only a field that has agreed to come indoors. The dandelions pushed up through the cracks in the yard out back, and when the side doors blew open, the seeds rose off the window ledges like a crowd getting to its feet. Her grandmother said it meant luck. Her grandmother said a lot of things, and most of them were true enough to dance to.

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One October the floor was thick with dust and the band had gone home to Coimbra. Mariana found a dandelion clock on the stage steps, its head gone grey and round, and she did what children do and blew it to tell the time. Seven breaths, her grandmother always said, though nobody had ever counted. Each breath lifted a handful of seeds over the empty tables, and the last of them drifted past the mirror, where a man in a borrowed jacket was practising the steps on his own.

He did not ask her name. He asked whether the seeds would ever land, and she told him that was never the point, the point was the going up. Then somebody wound the old gramophone, the needle caught, and the tune came out slow and crooked. He held out his hand. They turned between the falling seeds while the lamp burned down, and she heard her grandmother's voice in her head, sure as ever: a vida é bela, child. Life is beautiful. Then the lamp went out.