Black ink dandelion seed head with loose seeds drifting across the upper back and shoulder, a botanical tattoo photographed from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds drifting across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion seed head sits on the upper back near the shoulder, with its stem curving downwards, and several seeds drift away towards the top right of the frame. The linework is solid black with fine detail in the seed filaments, and there is no shading or colour. The warm, low-contrast photograph is taken from behind, with the subject's dark hair falling across the top of the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Dandelion Seed Stem Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind that came off the Downs that spring had no manners at all. It went straight through the open gate of Mrs Abernathy's allotment and up the rows of broad beans, and it took every dandelion clock on the lawn with it, sixty or seventy of them, I should think, though my grandmother always swore it was a hundred. You could not stop it. You could only watch the little parachutes go lifting over the hedge towards the church spire, and wish them luck.

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What I am telling you happened the summer young Tom Pardoe dug up the old wall behind the vicarage. He found a tin box under the roots of the damson tree, full of seeds in twists of brown paper, each labelled in a hand nobody could read. Tom thought it was treasure. His mother thought it was rubbish and wanted it burned. The vicar, who was a sensible man, said only that the labels were in Latin and that someone had been very careful indeed.

So Tom planted one, the one marked with a crooked dandelion, in the bare corner where nothing had grown since the war. It came up in a night, or so he told everyone, and by August it had gone to seed. He stood at the bottom of the garden with his hand on the stalk, and he blew, the way you do, once and hard. Every seed went off over the wall, one after another, and the last one caught the sun and went glittering over the Pardoes' roof, and Tom ran after it until he was out of breath.

He never found where they landed. Nobody did. But the following spring, the wall ran with yellow from one end to the other, and that is how you know the wind in this village still keeps its promises.