Close-up of a fine line black tattoo of two dandelion seed heads on stems, placed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dandelion seed heads on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two dandelion seed heads on thin, curving stems, drawn in delicate black linework with the seed heads shown as dotted clusters. The stems cross and fan out across the forearm, leaving plenty of bare skin around the design. The ink is a single black tone on a light skin tone, with the photograph taken straight on against a plain grey background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Dandelion Seed head Stem Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags kept the dandelion clock on the sill of the net loft in Shields, in a jam jar with a crack down one side. Every morning before the boats went out she blew on it once and counted what was left on the stalk, because she said the seeds were the days still owed to her husband Tom. There were eighty-one when the Good Intent cleared the harbour wall in October.

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I was seventeen and sick over the rail by the Farne light, and Tom was the one who told me to stop staring at the water and look at the wind. The fog came down like wet sailcloth. We lost the port lamp, then the Ellen Rae, which we heard calling for a bearing and then did not hear at all. Tom stood at the wheel with the stalk tucked inside his oilskin, the way a man carries something his mother gave him.

When we came in on the third morning there were thirty-four seeds left, and Mags was at the wall before the lines were fast. She did not count them. She took the clock from Tom's hands, held it to her mouth and blew, and the whole head went out over the harbour in one gust, a hundred small white lamps drifting low across the grey water towards the open sea.

Nobody on the wall said a word. We stood there and watched them go after the boats, and for once nobody needed to count them.