Black line drawing of a dandelion clock with drifting seeds and the words my wish in flowing script, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper.

Dandelion seeds with my wish script

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a dandelion seed head at the lower centre, with its stem curling into the words my wish in cursive lettering. Four separate seeds drift upwards and to the left and right across the upper half of the page. The work uses fine black ink outlines with dotted seed tips and no shading, on a cream background.

Fine line Botanical Lettering Dandelion Script Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Kessel Bridge turned my passport over twice, as if the photograph might have changed its mind about me. Behind me a lorry idled and the air smelt of diesel and cut grass. Along the verge a dandelion had gone to seed, and its pale clock shivered every time a truck rolled past.

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My grandmother taught me to blow them on the allotment behind our flats in Ostrova, when I was small enough to need both hands to hold the stalk. Make your wish on the last seed, she said, and never say it aloud, or it will not cross over with you. I had never wished for anything so plainly as I did that morning: that the stamp would land and the striped barrier would lift.

'Where are you going?' he asked. 'My aunt's, in the town with the blue shutters,' I said. 'And what is in the bag?' Just clothes and a tin of her plum preserve, wrapped in a jumper. He nodded at the glass and the queue behind me shuffled its feet. Then one seed came in through the open window of the booth, turned slowly above the counter, and settled on the page between us.

He looked at it for a long moment, then at me. 'Yours?' 'It isn't mine,' I said. 'It goes where it likes.' He pressed the stamp down, slid the passport back under the glass, and lifted his hand. When I stepped out, the seed had drifted over the white line and come to rest on the far tarmac, its dark tip pointing back at me like a finger that had already made its wish.