Colour tattoo of an antler and a fern frond on the outer thigh, drawn in a botanical style with soft shading.

Antler and fern on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of a pale antler curving upwards, with a green fern frond running alongside it and a reddish-brown rock or fungal form at its base. The linework is fine and the antler is shaded with light and dark tones to suggest texture. Greens and browns dominate the composition, which sits centrally on the outer thigh with the skin visible around it.

Botanical Thigh Antler Fern Plant Leaf Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The bracken has finally gone brown along the wall, so I went down to the old deer park with the loppers this morning, the way you told me to before the frost. I nearly stepped on the antler. It was lying in the leaf litter at the foot of the beech bank, pale as a bone, and somebody, probably a fox, had worried the end of it smooth. Growing up beside it was a single male fern, its fronds as tall as my shoulder, and where the brow tine met the stone there was a lump of rust-coloured tufa the size of a loaf, furred over with moss.

I sat on the wall for a long while with the loppers across my knees. I wanted to take it home and put it on the mantelpiece beside Dad's pipe, but the fern had its roots down into the grit of that stone, and I could not see how to lift one without losing the other. So I cut nothing. I pushed the antler back into its nest of dead leaves and knelt there until my knees complained.

Here is the odd part. When I came back up the slope the sun had moved, and the fern's uppermost frond had swung round so that it lay exactly in the hollow of the fork, green against the grey-white of the horn. I took a photograph on my phone, which will be useless, as you know how I am with cameras. Come down at Easter and see it for yourself. Bring your good secateurs, and don't you dare tidy it.

Love, Ruth