Fine line black ink tattoo of a dandelion seed head with drifting seeds, placed on a woman's upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds drifting across a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion seed head with a long, thin stem sits on the upper back, with several small seeds drifting upward and across towards the shoulder. The linework is delicate and mostly single-stroke, with soft grey shading giving the seed head some depth. The ink is black and grey on warm skin, and the composition leaves open space around the tattoo against a dark background.

Fine line Botanical Back Shoulder Dandelion Seed Stem Flower Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind over Caddan Pass had taken your father's hat twice before noon, so by the third gust you had stopped chasing things and started watching what else it carried. Seeds, mostly. The dandelion clocks on the north slope had gone to fluff, and each blow lifted a few from the head you had snapped off at the track's edge and tucked into your coat for Ines, the mule-girl, who wanted one to wish on.

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Ines would not let you wish for her. A wish needed a witness who wasn't in a hurry, she said, and you were plainly in a hurry, pacing the stony track while the sky over the ridge turned the colour of wet slate. The snow would come down off Caddan by dusk and the saddle would close. Your father's survey pins were still in the cairn up there, four of them, and he had asked you to bring them down before the light went.

So you held the clock up to the wind and blew. The seeds went in a loose line, rising from the stem and climbing the slope towards the grey shoulder of the col, each one a little apart from the next as if they had agreed on the distance. Ines laughed and said they were not wishing either. They were only going over the top, which was what seeds did when they had any sense.

At the cairn you pulled three pins from the stones and left the fourth wedged where it was, for whoever came next to find. Coming back down, you found one seed caught on the wool at your cuff, still whole, its fine hairs trembling. You did not blow it off. You opened your hand and let the wind take it over the ridge, towards a valley neither of you had seen yet.