Black ink drawing of a dandelion seed head releasing seeds across pale paper, a botanical design with fine linework and no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds drifting from a stem

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a dandelion stem with a ragged seed head on the left, with individual seeds drifting up and to the right. The linework is fine and sketchy, with dense hatching on the seed head and thinner strokes on the seeds and stem. The image is monochrome on a pale, off-white background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Dandelion Seed Stem Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the Marigold is warped in against the north wall, the wind has swung south and the seed heads along the quay are letting go. You stand on the wet planks with the mooring warp still in your fists and watch them lift off the wall, a hundred pale threads turning over the harbour mouth. Gerry is still shouting from the wheelhouse about the tally sheet, but you are counting seeds instead, the way your gran taught you to count gulls.

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Nine days out and the nets came up light. Everyone on the fleet says the same thing in the Ship Inn: the cod have gone deeper than the old charts allow. You sat at the end of the bar with a half of bitter and drew a dandelion on a beer mat with the stub of a carpenter's pencil, the head ragged, the stalk bent by a wind you could not see. Gerry took it off you and pinned it above the till, and nobody asked where it came from.

Now the sheet says eleven stone for the week, which will not cover the diesel. You fold it into your oilskin and walk up the hill to the chandler's, where the skipper's widow keeps a ledger and a kettle on the hob. Let her be the one to say no. You have already done the hard part, which was letting the seeds go.

Behind you, the last of them catch the low sun and lift clear of the wall, each one carrying further than the boat has ever been.