Black and grey lettering reading Aotearoa in script, beside a silver fern frond, tattooed on the top of a bare foot resting on grass.

Aotearoa script and silver fern on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a bare foot resting on grass, with a braided anklet above the ankle. The word Aotearoa is written in flowing script on the top of the foot, with a silver fern frond beside it that has fine, shaded leaflets. The black and white image is softly lit, with the toes and dark toenail polish in the foreground and the grass blurred behind.

Lettering Botanical Other Script Anklet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dougal had been walking the Ruahine tops for three days when the cloud came down like a dropped blanket, and he could not see his own boots. His mate Hemi had gone on ahead to the hut with the mules and the lamp, and Dougal had stopped to fix a pack strap that would not stay fixed no matter how he pulled it.

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The ferns along the track were the only things he could make out, grey-green in the murk until a gust lifted them. Every frond turned over in the wind and showed its underside, bright as tin. His grandmother had told him that the fern keeps its green face to the earth and its silver face to the traveller, and that if you follow the pale side you will never walk in a circle. He had always thought it a nursery story, the sort of thing said to get children to eat their greens.

He followed the silver for an hour, stooping at each frond and counting them the way she had taught him, until a gap opened in the cloud and he saw the smoke of the hut rising through the grey. Hemi was on the step with the lamp held high, shouting his name, and the mules were stamping in the lee of the wall.

Dougal kept a single frond pressed inside his hymnbook for the rest of his life, silver side up. When anyone asked him the way home, he would simply turn one over in his fingers and point.