Black and grey botanical tattoo of a fern frond and grass sprigs with leaves on the upper arm, with a knitted jumper and a white brick wall behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern and grass sprigs on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large fern frond in black linework runs diagonally up the upper arm, with finer branching leaflets. Below it, sprigs of grass or wheat and broad leaves are drawn with shaded detail that continues beyond the edge of the frame. The tattoo is black and grey with soft grey shading, set against pale skin, a dark top and a white brick wall.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Fern Leaves Grass Wheat Plant Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Corrin Head had been dark for three nights when the supply boat came round the point with your father's logbook and a crate of wet ferns, and no father. You stood on the slipway with the wind pulling your hair across your mouth while the boatman lifted the crate onto the concrete. "Ministry man asked for these," he said, not meeting your eye. "Said your dad had been pressing them in the log since spring."

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You carried the logbook up the hundred and twelve steps in the dusk, the crate knocking against your hip. The pages smelled of paraffin and salt. Between the entries for February gales he had laid fronds flat as butter knives, each one labelled in pencil with the date and the wind speed, as though weather could be kept in a book if you were patient enough. Near the back, a sprig of wheat lay folded inside a page torn from the tide tables, its ears still faintly gold, and beside it he had written a list of things the lens needed: a new gasket, a file for the brass, a second wick, a pair of hands that were not his.

The gallery was colder than the stairwell. Salt had crusted the glass in pale fern shapes, and the mantle was a grey sponge. You worked until your fingers stopped feeling the brass, trimming the wick to the length of your thumb the way he had shown you when you were nine and bored of watching. Beneath the final entry, in ink rather than pencil, he had written: Do not wait for the weather to be kind. Light it when it is ready.

You struck the match. The flame caught, steadied, and the beam swung out across a sea the colour of pressed grass, reaching for the boat that had not yet left the harbour.