Black and white photo of a fine line dandelion tattoo with drifting seeds and French script across the lower back.

Dandelion seeds and French script on lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the lower back shows a dandelion with its seed head drifting into several loose seeds. Handwritten French script, reading les temps sont durs pour les reveurs, runs diagonally across the skin beside the flower. The linework is fine and even, with the shading kept minimal, and the tattoo sits centrally against the skin above low-rise denim.

Fine line Back Dandelion Seed Script French text Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine, sitting on the cold wall at the bottom of Pell's orchard while windfalls go soft in the grass around your trainers. August has made the air thick and sweet. Your brother is down by the field gate, blowing hard at a dandelion clock and pretending each seed is a wish already granted. Your mother's voice drifts over the hedge from the kitchen window. She says her sentences in French when she is tired, because she claims it is the only language built for sighing: les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs. You don't know what it means yet. You only know she means you.

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Mr Pell's dog barks at nothing. You pick a seed head gone grey and fluffy and count the strands out loud, as if counting could keep them. Forty-one. Your brother runs past with his arms out, and the seeds lift off the stalk and wander over the top of the apple rows, slow and unhurried, belonging to nobody.

Years later you find the sentence again, scrawled on the back of a pharmacy receipt and folded inside her recipe book. Beside it she has drawn one seed, small and careful, drifting off the edge of the page. You read it as a complaint for a long time. Then one morning, standing at a sink of cold water with nothing on your mind, you understand it is closer to a set of directions.

So you go back to Pell's orchard in late summer, when the wall is warm and the apples have started to drop. You sit where you used to sit, open your hand, and let the wind take whatever it wants.