Watercolour dandelion with a purple wash and two dragonflies on the side of a ribcage, with drifting seeds and black linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour dandelion and dragonflies on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large dandelion clock with a purple and blue watercolour wash on the side of the torso, with dark linework defining the seed head and stem. Two dragonflies sit on the design, one near the top beside the seeds and one lower down, and loose dark seeds drift away towards the right. The tattoo is in colour with a dark, fine finish, set against a bare midriff and a striped bikini top.

Botanical Ribs Dandelion Dragonfly Seed Watercolour Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corran had carried the dandelion clock in a tin for eleven weeks, the last of its seeds pressed flat under the lid so the salt would not reach them. Every morning on the ship Haldane Rose he opened it to look, and every morning the seeds were still there, grey and feathered, waiting for a wind that was not yet out on the water.

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Dragonflies found them in the second week out. Nobody aboard had seen a dragonfly so far from land, and the cook swore they were the drowned fishermen of the northern banks, come back to count the crew. Corran did not believe that. He thought they were lost, the way he was lost, and had followed the ship because a ship is the only thing on an empty sea that keeps moving.

On the fortieth night the captain asked him what the tin held. Corran told him the tale his grandmother had given him: that a dandelion clock keeps every wish you have not yet made, and that the wind carries each one to the place it is needed. The captain laughed, then went quiet, and then asked him to open it.

When the lid came off the air was still. Corran held the tin over the rail and waited. A breath came up from the south, warm and smelling of rain on dry grass, and the seeds lifted all at once and went out over the black water in a long unravelling line. Two dragonflies rose after them. Corran made no wish of his own. He watched until the last seed was too small to see, and then he went below and slept.