Fine line black ink tattoo of a dandelion seed head breaking up into small butterflies across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion seeds turning into butterflies on back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dandelion seed head on a long stem sits low on the left and its seeds drift up and to the right, where they change into a scatter of small butterfly silhouettes. The linework is fine and the tattoo is done in solid black ink with no shading or colour. The design runs diagonally across the upper back, with the skin and a white halter strap filling the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 4.10 was running twelve minutes late when the boy on platform two blew his dandelion clock across the tracks. I was still picking seeds out of my collar when Mr Okafor shouted down from the signal box that the points had frozen again, which was no surprise, because nothing on this line had run on time since the spring of 1987.

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I'd worked the booking hatch at Carrow Bridge for nineteen years. In that time I had learned that people leave things on platforms: gloves, umbrellas, a teddy bear with one eye, and once a whole wedding cake in a box that nobody ever came back for. The thing I found that Thursday was a single return ticket, folded into a tiny square and tucked under the slats of the bench. Its date was three years old. Its destination was the sea.

I was turning it over when the seeds came in through the open waiting room door. They drifted the way they always do, slow and sideways, catching the draught off the tracks. Then, one by one, they tilted and opened into wings. Small dark butterflies, no bigger than a fingernail, lifted off the bench and went out past the rusted gate after the train.

I didn't stop them. I punched the ticket with the old machine, dated it today, and dropped it in the lost property box. The 4.10 pulled out at last, and I watched the specks rise above the carriage roof until they were gone over the hedge, somewhere on the far side of the hill, towards the sea.

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