Black ink flash design of a dandelion seed head and drifting seeds above dotwork mountains framed in a circle, with dandelion leaves at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds and mountains in a circle

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A dandelion seed head sits left of centre, with several seeds drifting off towards the upper left. Inside a large circle, faceted mountains are shaded with dense dotwork, and dandelion leaves run across the lower foreground. The design is drawn in fine black linework on white paper, with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Dandelion Seed Mountain Circle Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 wind came down off Hollin Scar on the second Tuesday of June and carried the dandelion clocks across the lane like a flock of pale moths. My uncle Tobias stood at the gate with his pipe unlit and counted them the way other men counted sheep. "Seven past noon, and the mountains are shedding," he said. He was a county surveyor who believed the hills had moods he could chart.

Keep reading

That summer I was nineteen and bored in Thrale Cross, where the forest came up behind the churchyard and nobody went past the fallen oak. Tobias had me drawing for his survey: ridgelines, scree, the crooked wall marking the parish bounds. He insisted on dots rather than lines, because lines lied about shadow. I stippled rock faces until my wrist ached, and he would tap the paper and say, "Again."

On the last evening he sent me up to the old triangulation stone with a tin of ink and a card ring cut to frame the view. "Draw what you see inside the circle," he said. I sat on the warm stone while a dandelion head shivered by my boot, and seeds lifted one after another, each trailing its tiny hook of thread. I realised I had been drawing the mountains as if they were solid, when the whole valley was just a moment of wind.

When I came down, Tobias had lit his pipe. He held the drawing to the lamp for a long while, then pointed at the seeds drifting past the gate. "Those are the ones that got away," he said. "Everything else stays where I put it." The circle is a little crooked, and so is the path of the seeds, but one has settled on the page by the edge of the peaks, and I have never had the heart to brush it off.