Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of dandelion seeds turning into birds across the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour dandelion and birds on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows dark silhouettes of birds and a dandelion seed head drifting into loose splashes of blue, purple, green, orange and pink. The linework is soft and blurred, with the colour bleeding out in drips and washes rather than defined outlines. It runs horizontally across the upper back, with the dandelion at the right and the birds spread to the left.

Shoulder Dandelion Bird Seed Paint splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the harbour has been wrong all week, pushing the gulls inland and the fishing boats back against their moorings, and you have been sitting on the seawall with your uncle's paintbox open on your knees, trying to catch it. Every morning the paper goes blue, then green, and every morning the colours run together into mud before the tide turns.

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Mrs Tamsin from the chandler's shop says you have to let the water do the work. She says it while watching a boy on the slipway blow a dandelion clock, the seeds lifting in a rush over the wall. You remember your grandmother counting them out loud, one for the house, one for the sea. The boy's breath scatters them, and a dozen seeds catch the light and turn, for a moment, into swallows against the orange of the fish sheds.

You don't paint the swallows. You wet the paper again, load the brush with violet and let it bleed down toward the water, then drop a thread of pink into the wash and watch it spread like spilt ink across slate. The seeds you flick with the tip of a stiff bristle, a dozen pale specks on the green. When you look up the boy has gone home, and the real gulls are drifting in off the breakwater.

That evening you carry the wet sheet to the end of the pier and lean it against the rail. The colours have bled into a bruise of blue and orange, the birds small and dark at its edge. A gust takes the paper from your hands before you can steady it, and it skims the harbour, colours dripping off the edges into the tide, until the last of the seeds lift off the water and the gulls follow them out to sea.