Fine line black tattoo of dandelion seeds drifting across the collarbone, with a dandelion clock turned into a hot air balloon on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds and hot air balloon on a collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper chest and collarbone area, cropped below the chin, with a black ink tattoo of dandelion seeds drifting across the skin. On the right, a larger dandelion clock has a small basket beneath it, forming a hot air balloon. The linework is fine and delicate, with the seeds rendered in thin strokes and little shading, and the composition runs diagonally from the left collarbone toward the shoulder.

Fine line Botanical Chest Shoulder Dandelion Seed Hot air balloon Basket

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tyre has been complaining since the last servo at Mullen Bore, and by the time you reach the rise the note has become a whine you feel in your back teeth. You pull onto the gravel shoulder and step out into air so dry it pulls the moisture from your lips before you can lick them. Across the flat, something pale is lifting off the salt, a small wicker basket swinging beneath a canvas the colour of stewed tea.

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Nobody is meant to be out here, which is why the woman leaning over the basket's rim seems so pleased to see you. Her name is Ada Brackwell, she says, and she has been trying to land the same dandelion clock for thirty years. Its seeds keep lifting off the crown and drifting across the road, catching on fence wire and the wipers of stopped cars, and she needs help counting them before the wind swings round to the north.

You count eleven. She counts twelve and insists the last one is a tick. You hold the tether while she fiddles with the burner, and the basket tugs at your palms like something eager to leave. She tells you a dandelion clock only tells the hour by how many breaths it takes to strip it bare, and that in all her years she has never managed it in one.

When the flame roars and the basket lifts, you let go before you can think about it. Ada raises a hand to her brow. A single seed has snagged on your sleeve, so you pinch it free, close your eyes and blow. It rides the dry air east over the salt, past the car ticking in the heat, and you watch it until it is only a speck, still counting.