Black and grey botanical tattoo of fern fronds running from the collarbone over the shoulder, with a hand resting on the chest.

Black fern leaves across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a bare upper body showing a large fern-like frond tattoo that follows the collarbone and sweeps across the shoulder. The leaves are solid black with fine hatched detailing along their edges, and the skin around them is pale and softly lit against a plain white wall. Another dark tattoo is visible on the upper arm, and the fingers and hand at the lower edge carry further linework and ornamental swirls.

Botanical Blackwork Shoulder Chest Upper arm Hand Fern Leaves Frond Swirl Ornament Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern came up the headland path the spring the new lamp was fitted, and by June it had reached the cottage wall. You cut it back every morning with the billhook Mr Pascoe left you, the blades heavy with dew, the fronds so dark they looked wet even when they were dry.

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Pascoe had said the old keepers pressed them between the ledger pages, that a frond left a year came out the colour of ink and held its shape like wire. You didn't believe him until the autumn gale tore the north gutter away and you found, under the lichen on the lamp-room step, a whole curled frond growing out of the mortar, black as a furled umbrella and unbothered by the salt.

You carried it up the spiral stairs in your coat pocket. The great lens threw its light across the water in slow white bars, and you held the frond to the glass so its shadow fell across the chart on the table, feathered and exact, the leaflets lined up like a fleet of small boats leaving harbour.

When the relief boat came in November, you pressed the frond inside the logbook, on the page for the night of the gale, and wrote beside it the one entry Pascoe would never have made: *growing where nothing should*. Then you went down the path with the billhook and left the rest of the ferns standing for the gulls.