Blue and black fern frond tattoo curving from the shoulder down the upper arm, drawn in botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern frond across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A fern frond runs from the collarbone over the shoulder and down the upper arm, built from rows of short, evenly spaced strokes along a central stem. The ink shifts from near-black at the collarbone to deep blue and then a lighter blue towards the lower arm, giving the frond a gradient. The design follows the curve of the shoulder and is shown against a plain light background with a black strapless top.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Fern Frond Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frond came up the glasshouse wall the week after the boiler failed, and nobody would own to leaving the vent open. Mr Hebble blamed the frost. Ada blamed the Dutchman who had sold us the spores and never written back. What I know is that by Thursday it had reached the iron trellis under the north pane, and every stroke of it was darker at the root than at the tip, as if somebody had painted it from the bottom of a well and kept climbing toward the light.

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We counted the pinnae on the first leaf, Ada with her pencil and me with my lips moving over the numbers. Forty-one on each side, each one a little shorter than the one below, and the stem curving the way a wrist turns when a person reaches for something just out of reach. Mr Hebble wanted it cut and pressed for the show in Leeds. Ada laid her hand flat over the stem and said that cutting it would take the blue out of it, and he went off muttering about sentiment, which was the nearest thing to agreement either of them ever managed.

It was the lamp that settled the matter. One evening I came back for my shawl and found the lowest fronds had turned the pale blue of the sky over the weir at six o'clock in July, while the tip was still inky enough to lose itself against the brick. Nothing in the catalogue had a colour like that. We never sold it. We left the door propped open that autumn, and in the mornings the frond had leaned out over the sill into the yard, reaching for the river beyond the wall, its lowest strokes already pale with the cold.