Black and grey realism style dandelion tattoo on the ribs with drifting seeds and the words behaving as the wind behaves along the stem.

Dandelion seeds and script on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion clock sits at the top of a long stem that curves down the side of the torso, with several seeds drifting off to the upper right. The seed head is shaded in fine grey and black linework, and the stem is solid black with the quotation behaving as the wind behaves written along it in cursive script. The plain skin background and close crop keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Realism Lettering Ribs Dandelion Seed Stem Script Wind Quote

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 boats of Carrick Haven went out on the morning the wind swung round to the east, and every woman on the quay knew it was wrong. Old Mairi Lunan had the cliff path to herself that day, and she carried a dandelion clock in her apron pocket because her grandson had picked it for her on the way down from school. He was seven and believed a clock with all its seeds still on would tell the weather.

Keep reading

Mairi did not believe it. She had buried a husband and two sons to the sea and had learned that the wind kept its own counsel. When the first boats came back short, with the Prudence towed in by the Kestrel and no sign of the Ellen Gray, she walked to the harbour wall and sat with the clock in her lap. Nobody spoke to her. The men were coiling rope and would not look up.

Toward evening the wind dropped, then came round to the west as easily as a dog turning in its bed. Mairi blew once on the clock. Seeds lifted off the crown and went out over the water, dozens of them, carried in the one direction the sea would allow, and she watched them until the light gave out.

Near midnight the Ellen Gray came in under her own sail, slow and sound, with her skipper Tam Rennie at the tiller. He had let the wind take them round the headland rather than fight it. 'The sea was behaving as the wind behaves,' he told the quay, and he laughed like a man who had been afraid. Mairi said nothing about the clock. The next spring she gave her grandson a fresh one and told him what the old women had told her: row where the water is, and let the rest go where it goes.