Fine line black and grey tattoo of a figure with dandelion seeds drifting away, on the upper arm.

Dandelion seeds drifting from a figure on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised human figure with the head turned away, the hair and face softly shaded and the body trailing into long, fine lines. Dandelion seeds on delicate stems drift away from the figure in two clusters, one above and one below. The work is entirely black and grey, with fine linework and soft, diffused shading across a pale skin surface.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Figure Dandelion Seed Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Halvorsen Crossing wanted to know what was in the jam jar, and I told him it was wishes. He held it up to the lamp anyway. Inside, packed in damp cotton wool, were forty-one dandelion clocks I had picked from the verge behind the goods shed that morning, their seeds still folded tight as the teeth of a comb.

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My grandmother had taught me that a clock must be blown in one breath or the wish goes nowhere. She had crossed this same line in the winter of 1961 with a single seed sewn into the hem of her coat, and she never told anyone what she had wished for. She said only that it had landed somewhere green, and that was enough for her. I had her coat over my arm now, too heavy for the August heat, because the officer had insisted on searching it twice.

"Open it," he said. So I unscrewed the lid, and the air from the open door of the shed caught the clocks before either of us could move. Seeds lifted off in a grey mist, drifting over the counter, past the stamp pad and the tin of paper clips, out through the gap where the barrier arm stood still. They turned slowly over the wire, catching the light, and kept going towards the far side where the fields were already going to seed.

The guard watched them go with his mouth slightly open. Then he laughed, a short surprised sound, and stamped my papers without reading the second page. Behind me, the last few seeds were still rising over the fence. On the other side, where nobody had yet thought to check, I imagined the first thin green shoots pushing up through the verge.