Black and grey fine line tattoo design of a dandelion with drifting seeds above the script words Just Breathe.

Dandelion seeds with Just Breathe script

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a dandelion seedhead with its seeds blowing away into the air, with the script words Just Breathe... beneath it. The linework is fine and even, with the seeds drawn as small, scattered strokes. The design is in black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Fine line Lettering Dandelion Seed Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They say the last dandelion on Harrow Deep was kept under glass by a woman named Imre Calloway, who would not let the wind near it. The settlement ran on recycled air, and every breath was counted in the ledger at the lock, so children learned early to breathe slow and small. When the fever came up through the lower tunnels, the old women said the sickness rode on quick breath, and that a person who panicked only gave it more road.

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Imre's granddaughter, Pell, was nine and could not stop gasping. She crawled to the glass one night and asked why the seeds never flew. Imre said they would fly when someone opened the dome to the surface, and the surface was not safe yet. Pell asked how the seeds knew when to go. Imre took the stem between her finger and thumb and blew, softly, the way her own mother had taught her, and a dozen pale threads lifted and drifted toward the vent.

The fever broke in the spring, though nobody could say whether it was the air, the counting, or the old songs. Pell kept the seedhead after Imre died, and every morning she breathed out at the glass, long and slow, until the children in the lower tunnels copied her without knowing why. The dome stayed sealed. The ledger at the lock went on counting, but fewer people were coughing.

On the morning the first hatch was cleared, Pell lifted the glass herself and let the draught take what it wanted. The seeds rose past the grille into light that had not touched Harrow in forty years. She told the children gathered below to just breathe, and the rest, she said, would follow.