Small fine line black tattoo of dandelion seeds drifting on the neck behind the ear, in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of dandelion seeds with thin, delicate stems sits on the skin behind the ear, with one seed head higher and one lower. The linework is fine and dark, with no shading beyond the strokes of the seed plumes. The photograph is black and white, with a hand holding back the hair and a chain earring in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Neck Dandelion Seed Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dandelions came up through the flagstones of the inner bailey the spring my brother stopped writing to me, which is how I knew it would be a year for leaving things unsaid. Nobody lives at Hollin Keep now except the jackdaws and me, and I count my days by what the wind carries across the broken curtain wall.

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Old Mrs Pryce in the village shop told me you blow a seed head and every breath you let go is a wish that gets carried off to whoever is listening. I laughed at her over the bread. Then I climbed the north tower steps on a Tuesday in July with a flask of stewed tea and a letter I had written three times and never posted, and I found a seed head caught in the mortar of an arrow slit, its plume bent like a question mark.

I sat on the sill and blew. Two seeds lifted off the stone and went out over the moat, one high, one low, the way the two of us used to run ahead on the dyke path when we were children. I did not wish for him to write. I wished he would know where I had gone, which was nowhere much, only up here among the stones.

The next morning there was a stamped envelope under the gatehouse door, postmarked from a town I had never heard of. Inside, a single seed head was pressed flat between the pages of a road atlas, and beneath it a line in his cramped hand: still blowing about, are we. I have never asked whether he sent back my wish or made one of his own.