Black and grey fine line drawing of a dandelion with seeds blowing away, two birds in flight, and script wrapping up the stem, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Dandelion seeds blowing away with birds

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A dandelion seed head sits at the base of a curving stem, with seeds drifting upward and to the right. Three small birds fly near the top of the design, and a line of script follows the stem. The work is in fine black linework and fine dot shading on a plain white background, with the design centred and tall in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Dandelion Seed Bird Stem Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had counted the seeds off the wind-cleared dune for three summers before she trusted the sums. Each head held a hundred and more, her grandmother said, and each one would travel as far as the breeze allowed, which on Inishmore meant clean out over the sound and past the lighthouse rocks. So when the letter from Halifax came, folded small and smelling of diesel, she walked the cliff path with the envelope in her coat and a pocketful of dandelion clocks gone grey at the edges.

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She had not written back in a year. The ferry timetable had changed, the post boat came Tuesdays only, and the words she wanted would not sit still on paper. Instead she knelt on the turf above the bay and blew, once, twice, the way Da had taught them, until the seeds lifted off the head and streamed out in a loose arrow. Three gulls turned above her and went north, following the same current, as if they had been sent for.

The stem was the hard part. She had carved her brother's name into the bottom of the last one and watched the wind take that too, and it had taken her a month to stop checking the shore. Now she wrote the message on a slip of rice paper in her smallest hand, rolled it around the stalk, and tied it with a strand of wool from the ewe that had lambed in March.

The next morning the wind had backed to the west and the sound lay flat as a plate. She found the seed head bare, the stem bent but unbroken, and the paper gone. Somewhere past the rocks a man in a cold harbour town would be unrolling something that had come a long way on nothing but air, and she went down to meet the Tuesday boat with her hands in her pockets, no longer counting.