Black and grey fine line tattoo of queen anne's lace, a dandelion clock and dandelion leaves running down the thigh, shaded with dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wildflowers and dandelion clock down a leg

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A tall stem of wild flowers runs vertically down the skin, with a flat umbel of queen anne's lace at the top, a dandelion seed head in the middle and dandelion leaves at the base. The linework is fine and precise, and the flower heads and seed head are built up with stippled dotwork shading. The design is entirely black and grey, set against plain pale skin and a plain light background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Thigh Dandelion Wildflower Seed head Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The verge behind Coldharbour House was mown flat every spring, but the council always forgot it in June, and by the time the bin lorries came round the dandelions stood up to my knee. Gran called them clocks. One breath for each hour, she said, and I believed her until I was nine and counted it myself.

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We kept our own wild patch on the eleventh-floor balcony in a window box Gran had nicked from a skip. Queen Anne's lace came up beside the washing line from seed she'd carried home in her coat pocket from Margate. She showed me how the flat white heads drew inwards at dusk like a hand closing, and how, if you looked hard at the middle of one, there was a single dark floret where the queen had supposedly pricked her finger on a stitch. "Nobody believes the finger bit," she said. "But people always want a drop of drama in a flower."

The year the letter came from the housing association, Gran stopped going down to the verge. Her knees, she said, and the lift smelled of cat. I took her a clock in a jam jar every Sunday and she blew on it through the glass, slowly, the way you'd blow out a candle, counting the seeds aloud until they were gone. By October the window box was full of dead stems and I'd stopped taking the lift at all.

On the last Saturday before the removal van, I took the jar down to the verge alone and stood where the dandelions had been. I blew one clock, then another, and watched the seeds lift over the bins and the car park and the wall of Coldharbour House, all of them going somewhere Gran had never been. I counted to twelve. Then I stopped, because the hour was hers, and the wind was already taking the rest.