Black and grey botanical tattoo of mushrooms and fern fronds across a person's chest and sternum, with a white garment pulled aside.

Fern and mushroom chest tattoo

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of mushrooms at the top of the chest, with a branching arrangement of fern fronds spreading outwards and downwards across the sternum and under the bust. The linework is dark and clearly defined, with stippled shading on the leaves and stems giving them texture and depth. The design is symmetrical and set against plain pale skin, with a white fabric pulled to the sides.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Mushroom Fern Leaves Stem Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit closer, the fire won't hold past the second candle, and I'll not tell it twice to a man who talks through the good parts. Pass the bread down. The snow's been up to the sills since Tuesday, so we've all the night in the world, and the Harrow girl's tale is the only one worth the cold.

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She was sent up to the high wood the winter her mother's hands went stiff, to dig bracken roots before the ground locked. The ferns stood in the snow like old men who'd forgotten their coats, fronds bent under the frost but not broken. Where the fronds met the trunks she found the mushrooms, small grey caps in twos and threes, clustered and murmuring like gossips. Her grandmother had told her never to pick what grows under snow. So she knelt, told them her name, which is the proper way, and went on digging.

When she tried to walk home, every path curled back to the same stone well, and the ferns, green when she came, had rooted themselves across the track and wound up her boots. She cut them with her knife, and they grew back in the cut. By dusk she understood she was being kept, the way you keep a guest, and that the caps on the hill were the ones keeping her.

She gave them the bread from her pocket and the last of her mother's salt, and she sang the old song about the thaw. In the morning the path lay open, and on the well sat a single cap, pale as a plate, with a fern frond laid over it like a napkin. That's how you know the wood remembers you. Now drink up, and mind the stair. It's a long way down, and the snow never tells you where the step is.