Back of a woman's shoulder with a watercolour-style tattoo of a dandelion head and drifting seeds in black, blue and purple ink.

Dandelion seeds with watercolour wash on shoulder

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A dandelion clock with black ink linework and shading sits on the upper back and drifts into loose seed heads that trail across the shoulder. Soft blue and purple washes with splatter marks surround the design, giving a painted, watercolour look. The composition runs diagonally from the shoulder blade towards the top of the shoulder, with the subject shown from behind against a pale wall.

Botanical Back Shoulder Dandelion Seed Splatter Wash Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time Ruth reached the bottom orchard the dandelion clock had gone fully silver, and Tom was on his knees in the long grass beside the Bramley trees, cheeks puffed, ready to blow. "Not yet," she said. "Count the stripe first. Your nan always said you wait until the sun's behind the church."

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He sat back on his heels and squinted at the shadow of the tower, which had crept halfway across the lane. Eight o'clock, he decided, meant the coach from Hereford would reach the stile by nine, and his father would be on it, if the letter had been right about the rail strike. Ruth had stopped trusting letters since March.

The painter had been up here all week, a thin man with paint under his nails who set his easel against the wall of the cider barn and washed the sky in blue and violet, flicking water from his brush so the colour spat across the grass. Tom had watched him drown a whole head of seeds in the wash and then lift the paper to dry, and had asked why he didn't just paint them properly. "Because they're not finished," the painter had said. "They're going somewhere."

Tom blew. The seeds lifted in a grey breath, caught the orchard light, and scattered towards the shoulder of the hill in loose, uneven lines, some stalling, some racing off over the hedge. Ruth counted them without meaning to, the way she counted everything now. Fourteen. Nine. The last few drifted past the barn and stuck to the painter's wet paper, where they blurred into the wash.

The coach came at ten past nine, late, the way things came now. Tom ran the whole lane. Ruth stayed by the tree with the bare stalk in her fingers, and when she looked up the painter had gone, leaving one sheet pinned to the barn door. Across its corner a dandelion clock was drifting off the edge of the page, and beneath it, in pencil, he had written: for whoever is left to count.