Watercolour style tattoo of a teal and pink dragonfly and an orange dandelion seed head on the side of the ribs.

Dragonfly and dandelion seeds on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with teal and pink wings sits at the top of the design, with a dandelion seed head and drifting seeds below it. The linework is loose and thin, and the soft washes of teal, orange, pink and purple fade into the skin with splatter dots around the seeds. The design runs diagonally down the side of the torso, with a long stem tapering toward the bottom edge of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Dragonfly Dandelion Seed Insect Flower Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the gap in the hedge, there, where the bramble got in. Sit down on the wall if you like, the stone's still warm from the sun. Now, you want to know about Maud Pellow and the summer the dragonfly came to the orchard. Everyone in Cray Hollow knows it, though they tell it wrong.

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Maud was nine that year and had a jam jar of seeds she'd gathered off the verge by the pump. Her brother Eli said dandelion clocks were for wishing, and she said wishes were just weeds with ideas. She blew them across the orchard rows every evening, counting, because her mother said you could tell the hour by how many puffs it took to clear the head. Eight o'clock, that was the old lady's trick. Maud never got it right. Her puffs went everywhere.

The dragonfly arrived the week the apples went red. Teal as a kingfisher's back, with a flush of pink at the throat, and it hung over the pump like it was waiting for somebody to notice. Maud noticed. She held out the jam jar, and the dragonfly settled on its lid, and for a whole afternoon neither of them moved. When the seeds finally lifted off on the evening breeze, they drifted straight through the orchard, every one of them following the insect's shadow down the rows.

What the village forgets is that Maud kept the jar. Years later, when the orchard was sold and the pump was dry, she opened it on the back step and found a single seed still in there, grey and perfect. She set it on her palm and breathed out, slowly, the way you do when you're not counting anything at all.