Botanical tattoo of a dandelion with a red centre and seeds drifting up across the upper back and onto the arm, shaded in black and grey.

Dandelion seeds drifting across a back and arm

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A dandelion clock sits low on the back, with its seeds lifting and drifting diagonally up towards the shoulder and onto the upper arm. The seeds are drawn as small dark strokes and the head is shaded with soft grey gradients, with a single small red dot at its centre. The subject is photographed from behind against a plain pale green wall, with the model's arm raised.

Botanical Back Shoulder Upper arm Dandelion Seed Flower Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, that's the loose board by the ticket hatch, and you'll not want to go through it on a Tuesday. Now sit down on the bench and I'll tell you about the summer the dandelion came to Harrowby Halt.

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It was the last week of June, and Mr Pell, the signalman, had let the verge go to seed out of pure laziness. One morning there stood a clock the size of a cabbage at the end of platform two, grey as a dishcloth, with a single red bead at its middle where the stalk had been. The 7.14 came in, the carriage doors sighed open, and a breath of wind came off the cutting and took the whole thing apart.

The seeds went up like smoke off a struck match. They rode over the footbridge, past the goods shed, and lifted above the hedge where the farmer's wife was pegging out sheets. Every one of them wore a little hook of a tail and wanted to be somewhere else. Pell swore some went round the chimney of the Crown and came back down smelling of pipe tobacco.

But the red bead stayed. It sat on the platform edge, stubborn as a penny, until Tovey the guard, a soft-hearted man, picked it up and put it in his top pocket. When the 9.02 pulled out that evening, a girl with a cardboard suitcase leaned from the window, and he tossed the bead up to her. She caught it one-handed and grinned like she'd been waiting all her life for someone to hand her something worth carrying.

Years on, a postcard came from a city by the sea, showing a field gone white with clocks. Tovey pinned it above the kettle. Whenever the wind rattles the station door, he says the same thing: that's only the seeds, love, looking for their way back.