Black and grey lettering tattoo on a forearm reading you see flowers in these weeds, beside a dandelion seed head with drifting seeds.

Quote and dandelion seed head on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the phrase you see flowers in these weeds in mixed serif and script lettering, with a dandelion seed head at the upper right and loose seeds drifting down and to the left. The linework is thin and even, with light shading in the seed head and fine strokes in the stem. The photograph is in black and white, and the composition is close and angled across the wrist and forearm.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Dandelion Seed Quote Text Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandmother pulls the thistles out of the vineyard with her bare hands and calls the dandelions by their old name, a word you are not allowed to say near the priest. She keeps her hair tied up in a grey cloth and smells of goat and crushed thyme. This morning she sends you down the terrace with a hoe and a basket, and tells you the weeds belong to the vines' enemies, so you are to kill everything that is not a grape.

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You work until the sun slips behind the olive trees. The yellow heads crowd the foot of the wall, bright as spilt oil, and you chop them one after another until your shoulders burn. Then the wind comes up off the sea and the flowers go to white, each one a small pale globe of threads that lifts and turns like a fistful of lamps let loose. Hundreds of them rise over the terrace and drift past your face, and you stand there foolish, the hoe held up like a spear.

When you climb back to the house she is sitting on the step with a cup of wine watered too thin. She does not ask whether you finished. She looks at your hands, scratched and green, and says the plants you cut down were only ever growing where nobody had planted anything. Then she tips the cup towards the wall. In the dry cracks between the stones, seeds are already settling, and she laughs at the look on your face.