Two-panel photo of black and grey dotwork fern tattoos on an upper arm, one a full frond and one an unfurling fiddlehead.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern and fiddlehead on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a large fern frond running diagonally across the upper arm, with each leaflet outlined and shaded using fine stippled dots. The right panel shows a coiled, unfurling fiddlehead with a partial frond behind it, rendered with dense dotwork and fine lines. The tattoos are entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the close crop keeps the two panels evenly balanced.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Fern Frond Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dawn Whitlock finds me by the crisps, the way she always did, with her lanyard already turned to the front so everyone can read DAWN, LEEDS 1994. The hall still smells of radiator dust and squash. Somebody has put a banner over the stage that says WELCOME BACK, SIXTH FORM, and the letters have started to curl at the corners.

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"You were the fern girl," she says, and I tell her I was the girl who got kept in at break for pressing bracken between the pages of the biology textbooks. Miss Carrick used to take us into Hollin Wood every April, and Tessa Brand always found the fiddleheads first. She would crouch with her knees in the wet leaf litter and cup one in her palm, a tight green spiral like the end of a violin scroll. "Don't rush the coil," she told me. "It opens a little every day, or it tears."

Tessa went to Aberdeen and then somewhere with a conservation trust and a field station, and nobody here has heard from her in years. Tonight I have a carrier bag on the chair beside me with a frond wrapped in newspaper, pressed flat and brittle, dug out of a book I hadn't opened since I was seventeen. When I unwrap it under the strip lights, Dawn holds one edge up to the window and the leaflets catch the light, still exact, every serrated edge intact.

Before I leave I pin it to the noticeboard by the fire door, under the fundraiser for the minibus. A girl of about nine stops to look, tugs her dad's sleeve, and asks why the top of the fern is curled up like a question. I tell her it hasn't finished deciding, and that you have to wait for it, and she seems to accept this as a perfectly reasonable answer.