Black dotwork tattoo of a pair of sycamore seeds joined at a short stem, on the outer arm, with partial lettering tattooed at the upper right.

Sycamore seed tattoo on arm

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single pair of winged sycamore seeds joined at a short stem is tattooed on skin. The outlines are fine and dark, and the wing veining is shaded with stippled dots. The design is in black and grey ink and sits centred on the limb, with more tattooed lettering partly visible at the upper right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, and mind the kettle. No, not that chair, that's where Pasko the customs man sat the night he tried to weigh my grandmother's seeds. Every October the big sycamore on our side of the Ostrel dropped its keys by the thousand, and they came down in twos, joined at the neck like a pair of wings that couldn't agree on a direction. Nan's sister had married across the water in the year the fence went up, so the seeds were the only post that got through.

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So when she reached the crossing at Caldrey Ford with a fist of them stuffed in her hem, Pasko leaned out of his box and asked what she was declaring. She told him nothing that grows. He didn't believe her. He tipped the lamp down and turned them over with a pencil, and he saw the veins fanned out across each wing like the rivers on his own map, and he went quiet for so long that the queue behind her started muttering about tea.

In the end he dropped them out of the window. Not out of kindness, he always said, but because the seeds were already spinning, and a man can't stop a thing that's set itself going. They twirled down the bank and over the wire, and when Nan's sister went out at first light to look for them she found one in the reeds with its partner still attached by the stem, both wings still turning.

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