Colourful watercolour-style dandelion tattoo with black seeds and script lettering across the ribs.

Watercolour dandelion with script on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black dandelion clock with seeds drifting away sits on the side of the torso, with script lettering running alongside it. Bold rainbow washes of blue, pink, orange and green spread behind the flower in loose, splashed strokes, while the seeds and lettering are in crisp black linework. The image is a close, side-on crop of the body against a dark background.

Ribs Dandelion Seed Splash Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the Skerry always swung round to the north by four in the afternoon, and that was when my mother climbed the gallery stairs with a dandelion clock in her fist. She had picked it from the strip of grass behind the fog signal, where nothing else would grow, and she held it up to the lamp's sweep so the seeds caught the light before they left.

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I was nine the summer the relief boat stopped coming. Father had gone ashore for his brother's funeral, the harbour closed for eleven days, and it was just the two of us and the logbook. Mum taught me to blow the clock while making a wish, and to say the wish out loud in whatever language it was ready in. Hers were always in Spanish, from the village where she grew up, and they came out quick and certain, as if they had been waiting a long time to be spoken.

On the twelfth morning a fishing smack came round the point with a boy aboard whose engine had died in the swell. I watched him climb the rocks with his cap in his hands. Mum gave him the last clock on the sill and told him to wish for the people waiting on the far side of the water. He laughed and blew hard, and every seed went flying west, the way the gulls go when the weather turns.

Father came home on the Tuesday ferry. He found the logbook full of pressure readings and one line in my handwriting that read Mum's wish had come true, though I had no idea what she had wished for. Years later I asked her. She only smiled and said seeds never tell you where they land, only that they go.