Watercolour style tattoo of a dragonfly and dandelion seeds in teal, pink and purple across the side of a ribcage.

Dragonfly and dandelion seeds on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly sits at the upper right, with a dandelion clock and loose drifting seeds trailing down the side of the ribs. The linework is fine and broken in places, with soft washes of teal, orange, pink and purple and scattered black ink specks that give a painterly, loose finish. The colour fills most of the composition, which runs diagonally from the upper back edge down towards the lower side of the torso.

Botanical Ribs Dragonfly Dandelion Seed Ink splatter Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water had been gone from the Mojave for eleven years, but the rain had come in March, and now the flats were a sheet of green fizz. Marta pulled the van onto the shoulder beside a fence post with a blue cap, because seed heads were drifting across the road as if someone had shaken out a dozen pillowcases. She counted them without meaning to. Seven, nine, then a dragonfly came down the lane of heat and hovered above the bonnet, teal as a bottle, and waited for her to notice.

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"Don't," said her brother from the passenger seat, but she was already out, the door left open, the engine ticking behind her. The air smelled of wet clay and something sweet. She walked into the verge, where a dandelion clock stood taller than her knee, its white globe perfect and unbroken. She had promised Dev she would stop wishing on things. He had died in the spring, the same month the rain began, and she had never forgiven the weather for being so ordinary about it.

She bent and blew. The seeds lifted in a brief rush, a cloud shot through with orange light from the setting sun, then scattered in every direction at once, sliding over the cracked asphalt and into the purple dusk. The dragonfly followed the nearest one, then turned back and circled the van, cutting neat lines through the haze as if it carried a map of the road in its head.

Dev would have laughed at her for wishing. He would have said a dandelion doesn't care where it lands, and that was the point. She climbed back in and turned the key. Ahead, one seed had caught on the windscreen, pale and trembling, and she left it there all the way to the next town.