Black ink fine line tattoo of a dandelion whose seeds drift into small butterfly silhouettes beside the words what's past is prologue, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Dandelion seeds and quote across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion clock is drawn at the left of the frame, with its seeds breaking away and drifting up and across the shoulder blade towards the top right. Small solid silhouettes of butterflies and loose seed shapes are scattered along the path, and the script reads what's past is prologue in a thin italic serif. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black ink, with shading on the dandelion head and crisp, lighter lines on the lettering, against warm skin.

Botanical Lettering Back Shoulder Dandelion Seed Butterfly Script Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain on Saturday market had got into the cardboard, so the dandelion clocks you sold that morning were limp as wet hair by eleven. You stood under the awning of the fishmonger's, the one whose shutter never quite rolled down, and counted the coins in your apron twice. Four pounds forty. Enough for the bus, not enough for the seed tin your mother wanted fixed.

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A woman in a yellow mac stopped at your trestle and asked whether the clocks could still make a wish if they were drowned. You told her the truth, which was that nobody had ever checked. She bought the smallest one anyway and held it out at arm's length, the way you hold something you are afraid of breaking, and blew. Seeds went everywhere: over the cabbages, into the gutter, up past the clock tower where the pigeons sat with their heads tucked in.

Afterwards you found one still caught on your sleeve, a single grey filament that had survived the wet. You thought of a line you had copied out for school years ago, what's past is prologue, and decided the rain was only the prologue to something. It is an odd idea to carry around a market on a wet day, but it stayed with you all the way to the bus stop, where the shelter dripped down the back of your neck and you laughed for the first time since breakfast.

You never saw the woman again. But the following spring, on the cracked verge behind the bins, a dandelion came up gold and then went silver, and you knelt in the wet and blew on it until the last seeds lifted and turned and went looking for somewhere new to start.