Watercolour style fine line tattoo of a dandelion releasing seeds that turn into small birds, across the shoulder blade of a person.

Dandelion seeds and birds on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A dandelion with seed heads drifts across the shoulder, with seeds breaking away into a line of small black silhouetted birds that rise towards the top of the shoulder. The dandelion head is shaded in teal and purple washes, and the stems are fine dark lines. The soft blended colour contrasts with the sharp black bird shapes, and the composition follows a diagonal path from the lower left to the upper right.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Back Dandelion Seed Bird Swallow Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mira, the seed pods finally reached Kestrel Ridge on the third day of the thaw, pale as wishes and twice as stubborn, and I have been out on the terrace with a mug of barley tea trying to decide whether that counts as news. Your grandmother would have said yes. She always wanted something to blow in from the valley so she could chase it with a basket.

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The dome engineers want the old dandelion stands cleared for the new filter beds, so the drones have been mowing the lower meadow flat. I went down with a sack yesterday and pulled what I could before the blades came round. The heads were already loose, teal at the crown and a faint violet where the sun had got into them, and every one of them lifted the moment I touched it, as if it had been waiting for permission. Eleven seeds rode off across the wire fence before I stopped counting. The swallows that nest in the vent housing went up after them in a loose line, black against the sky, then peeled off towards the north ridge where the rewilded orchards are.

I am not writing to tell you the meadow is saved. It isn't. I am writing because the wind this morning came from the south-west, the way you said it would when you left, and I stood there with my hair in my face and thought, well, there it goes, all of it, and it still isn't gone.

Write when the signal holds. Tell me what the coast looks like from the transport window. Tell me you have found a patch of something that will not lie down for anyone.

Your sister, Ilse