Fine line black ink tattoo of a dandelion seed head on a bare midriff, sitting just above the waistband of denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelion tattoo on the side of the abdomen

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a single dandelion with its seed head drifting apart, drawn with a long curving stem that sweeps down and to the left. The linework is fine and mostly unshaded, with small dots and strokes suggesting the loose seeds around the head. The ink is black and the composition places the design on the side of the torso, just above the waistband of blue denim jeans.

Fine line Botanical Other Dandelion Seed head Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bramleys have started dropping early, and the orchard smells of cider and bruised grass. You kneel under the third row with your grandfather's penknife, working a dandelion clock free at the stem so the head stays whole. Your sister is already saying it's bad luck to pick one before you've made a wish, so you tell her the wish is the reason you're cutting it, and she rolls her eyes and holds out her palm for the first seed.

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Grandad used to say the stem was the honest part. The seeds could go anywhere on a breath, over the wall, into Mrs Pardoe's pig field, up into the church bell rope, but the stem had to stay bent where you'd snapped it, a long dark line that remembered the hand. He said it the summer the orchard was sold, when the men in good coats walked the rows with clipboards and nobody would say the word for what was going to be pulled up.

You don't blow it. You carry it up the lane in a jam jar with holes punched through the lid and set it on the kitchen sill where the light comes through the glass. Your sister writes her wish on the back of a seed packet and tucks it under the jar. Nothing happens for two days. On the third morning the back door is propped open for the heat, and a draught runs through the house like a held breath let go.

When you come down the jar is empty and the lid lies on the mat. The stem is still on the windowsill, bent over in a loop. A few seeds hang in the net curtain, turning slowly in the sun above the sink, and out past the wall the Bramleys are coming down one by one, the men with clipboards already at the gate.