Black and grey tattoo of a shaded dandelion seed head with birds and seeds drifting up the side of the ribs, with the word Always below.

Dandelion seeds becoming birds on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion clock with shaded seeds at the base releases small stems that turn into black silhouetted birds in flight, with one bird picked out in a faint blue-grey tint. The word Always sits in a serif script beneath the dandelion. The photograph is taken close up and straight on, showing the design across the side of the torso.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the water at Hollin Point every March and took the dandelion clocks from the cliff meadow, and Nan Pryce said each seed that flew was a message nobody had sent. My brother Tam didn't believe her. He was nine and sure of most things, so he went up the cliff path with a jam jar and a pencil stub to prove her wrong.

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He came back at dusk with the jar full of grey fluff and a crooked drawing on the back of a fish-box label. Every seed, he said, had come loose from a stem and gone straight for the harbour, where the boats were out past the breakwater and not yet in. He had counted them against the lamps. Nan took the label, turned it over, and read the words he'd written underneath in capitals that leaned like sails: ALWAYS BACK.

The Maud Ellen came in two days later with a split mainsail and no skipper. Tam had been sure of it, and he was never sure of anything again, not in the same way. He kept the label in his coat for years. When the fleet put out in autumn he would walk to the top of Hollin Point alone and blow on a clock until it was bare, and watch the seeds go out over the water, counting them until the last one was lost against the grey.

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