Black and grey flash design of dandelion seeds drifting up from an ornate silhouette with butterflies and flowing script lettering, on a white background.

Dandelion seeds and script design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A design drawing on a white background shows an ornate silhouetted figure at the bottom, with butterflies scattered to its left. Dandelion seeds drift upwards from the figure, and flowing script lettering follows their path. Fine linework and grey gradient shading give the seeds and lettering a soft, faded finish, and no skin is visible.

Fine line Botanical Dandelion Seed Butterfly Silhouette Figure Script Lettering Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ringmaster's wagon had lost a wheel outside Thrapston, so the Marvellous Pell family sat in the field all of August waiting for a part that never came. Their tent had faded to the colour of weak tea. The lions were old, the horses had been sold, and only the aerialist was left, a woman called Idony Pell who had once hung by her teeth above forty people and now mostly hung washing.

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On the last Sunday of the month a boy came up the lane with a paper bag of pear drops and asked whether the circus still did wishes. Idony said they had never done wishes. He said his nan swore the old show could grant one if you blew the right seeds, and he pointed at the grey clocks of dandelions gone to seed along the ditch.

She laughed, then didn't. She climbed to the top of the empty big top while the boy held the ladder, and from the highest bar she blew across the field. The seeds lifted in a long ragged string, catching the last of the sun, and a flight of pale moths rose after them, and their path wound up over the canvas like a line of script nobody had finished.

The Pells say the wheel was mended by Michaelmas and the show went out again that autumn, but Idony never came down from that bar. On still evenings the seeds still rise from the top of the tent, and if you stand in the field long enough you can read her name in them, though nobody in the family will say it aloud.