Black and white photo of a fine line dandelion seed tattoo on the neck behind the ear, with two seeds drifting away from the head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Two dandelion seed heads drift across the skin behind the ear, one above the other, with a fine stem trailing down towards the neck. The linework is thin and delicate, with the seeds rendered in fine strokes and small areas of solid black. The photograph is black and white, with a hand holding back dark hair at the top of the frame and a chain earring visible on the right.

Fine line Botanical Neck Dandelion Seed Seed head Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first dandelion clock I found that spring was on the step of the infirmary, its seeds already loosened, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. I had been sent out with a trowel and a sack to clear the gravel paths before the bishop's clerks arrived, and Brother Oswin, who had taught me to weed twenty years ago, said nothing about the seeds when he handed me the sack. He never said anything plainly. He preferred that I work it out.

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I knelt and looked at the seed head for a long time. It was the sort of thing Oswin would have called a sermon in a weed: something that seems only to be waiting to be blown away, and is in fact doing the one job it was made for. The bell for None rang over the roof. I thought of the boys in the almonry who used to hold the clocks to their mouths and count the hours aloud until the wind took the last of them, and how Oswin once caught me doing it and smiled as if I had told him a joke he already knew.

I did not pull the rest. I went along the wall gathering the heads that had gone to down, pale and perfect, and carried them cupped in my hands to the infirmary window, where Oswin lay propped on two pillows with his eyes open. He did not ask what I was doing. I opened my hands at the sill and breathed out, and the seeds lifted, caught the thin light, and drifted over the wall towards the valley road where the wool carts came up from the town.

Oswin watched them go until the last one was a speck above the poplars. Then he said, "Good. Now the garden has to grow something it did not plan," and closed his eyes. I went back for the sack. A few seeds had caught in my sleeve, and I left them there until supper.