Flash sheet of black, blue, pink and teal dandelion seed heads with drifting birds, in a botanical style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dandelions and birds design sheet

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A design sheet showing several dandelion seed heads in black, blue, pink and teal, with seeds and small birds drifting away from them. The linework is fine and detailed, with light shading on the seed heads and green and blue stems. The designs are spread across the sheet, with the largest pink dandelion sitting towards the lower right.

Botanical Dandelion Bird Seed Flower Stem

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seeds came over the curtain wall the week the masons gave up on the north tower, a drift of them lifting off the meadow like breath off a cold cup. I was nine and had been told to keep out of the broken chapel, so naturally I went in, and found the dandelions had got there first, pushing up through the flagstones where the altar had been.

Keep reading

Father said the clocks in that place had stopped at the same hour since the old earl's time, and that the birds nesting in the lancet windows were the only tenants who paid rent. He taught me to count them. Starlings in the morning, a sparrow for every ruined arch, and a pair of goldfinches that lived in the bell frame and sang at the grey hour. When I asked why the dandelions never seemed to grow into anything, he said they were not growing, they were leaving.

The summer I turned twelve, the earl's great-grandson came to sell the estate. He walked the courtyard in polished shoes, stepping around the flowers as if they were a rule he had been warned about. I stood on the chapel steps with a fistful of seed heads, and when he asked what I was doing I blew, hard, and watched the white parachutes lift past the broken glazing, past the gulls and the swifts, out over the valley where the wind could decide.

He did not buy the castle. The following spring the north wall came down in one clean piece, and the grass grew right over the rubble, yellow, then white, then grey. I still have the last seed head I picked that day, pressed between two pages of a ledger in my father's hand. Some things in a ruin are only passing through, and it is the passing I keep.