Sketch style forearm tattoo of dandelion seed heads, a red sun and lettering in black ink with touches of red, on the inner forearm.

Dandelions and red sun on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows three dandelion seed heads on long, thin stems, drawn with loose sketchy linework and fine dots. A solid red circle sits behind the stems, and fragments of lettering reading nature called and graph run lower down, with faint outlines of leaves or petals near the wrist. Most of the ink is black with grey shading, and the red circle is the only strong colour against the pale skin.

Botanical Forearm Dandelion Seed head Sun Lettering Text Leaves Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dandelion clocks went up the lane every June, and nobody in Thorne Bottom ever asked why Mr Aske kept three of them in a jam jar on the post office windowsill. He said they were for the camera. The camera was a folding Brownie with a cracked bellows, lent to him by a girl who had walked out of the valley in 1936 and never sent back for it.

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Mrs Pell, who ran the counter, said the trouble with Aske was that he believed a photograph could catch a wish before the wind took it. Each evening he climbed the hill with the Brownie under his coat and held a seed head against the red sun going down behind the mill, counting the seeds as they lifted. Forty-one on the first night. Nineteen on the second. On the third he said the rest had gone to Harrogate.

On the first Tuesday of August a parcel arrived with a postmark from a city he had never visited. Inside was a single print: the sun a red coin, three seed heads leaning over a field, and along the bottom in pencil, nature called, and I answered. Aske sat on the step outside and did not get up until Mrs Pell brought him a cup of tea that had gone cold in the saucer.

He never said whether he had been asked to come or to go. But the jam jar stayed on the sill, and every evening after that a single seed head stood by the lane wall, its stem bent towards the sun, waiting for someone to take its picture.