Black fern frond tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a green cloth and a transfer sheet of the same design on a wooden table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black fern tattoo on a wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black fern or feather-like frond runs diagonally up the inner forearm towards the wrist. The shading is solid and dark, with the leaflets drawn as sharp, stacked shapes. A bright green cloth and a clear plastic sheet bearing a matching design lie on a wooden surface beside the arm.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Fern Leaf Frond Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern grew only on the north side of the wall in Haddow Lane, where the sun never reached the cobbles, and that was where Mabel Quayle went each night after the lamplighters had finished. She carried a green cloth in her apron pocket for wiping her hands and a flat tin of pins for the things she mended. Nobody asked her what she mended. The fern had sharp leaves, stacked one on another like the teeth of a comb, and when the wind came down the lane from the river they rattled against the brick like a man counting coins.

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One night in February a boy came running with his sleeve torn open at the wrist and a cut that would not close. He had been at the docks and something had gone into him that was not iron. Mabel sat him on the step and pressed the cloth to the wound, and the fern outside the gate bent its fronds toward the light of her lantern, though there was no wind to bend them. She pulled the frond from the wall with two fingers and laid it along the cut. The leaflets lay down flat and dark, and the blood stopped as if someone had shut a door.

The boy went home with a line of black along his arm that would not wash off, and he never once asked whose hand had drawn it. Mabel went back to the wall. The fern had grown a new leaf where she had taken the old one, sharp and black at the tip, and she counted it the way a sensible woman counts her wages, and then she went inside and slept until the lamps were lit again.