Black and watercolour style tattoo of a dandelion with seeds blowing up and over the shoulder, with blue and purple washes on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds drifting across a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black ink dandelion seed head sits on the upper back, with loose seeds drifting up and over the shoulder. Soft blue and purple washes of colour blend behind the design, with ink splashes and fine dark dots scattered along the trail. The photograph shows the back of a person with dark hair pulled up, and the face is out of frame.

Botanical Back Shoulder Dandelion Seed head Splash Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind has been coming off the moor for three days, and the big wheel has stopped turning twice already. You stand at the back of the coconut shy with a tin of pennies and watch the clockmaker's boy sell wishes from a paper cone at Pennick's Travelling Fair. Every wish is a dandelion head, blown once and gone. Nobody on the field has ever paid for one before.

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Then the stranger arrives with a grey lorry and asks for a single wish, not a penny's worth. He says he wants to be carried somewhere warm. You tell him the seeds only go where the wind pushes them. He laughs, and behind the dodgems the dusk comes up in bruised purple, blue at its edge where the sky has not yet given up the light.

You take the cone from the boy's hands and hold it to your mouth. The wish is not for yourself, you find, and that surprises you. You blow it towards the tents. The seeds lift in a rush, scattering dark specks across the canvas like spilt ink, and the stranger's hat goes sailing over the dodgem track, following them like a kite with a broken string.

By morning the fair has gone from the field, and only a scatter of white fluff remains in the grass. Years later a single dark seed turns up in a coat pocket, and you let the wind have it.