Black fine line fern frond tattoo with dotwork accents running along the forearm.

Fern frond on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black fern frond runs diagonally up the forearm, with its tip pointing towards the elbow and its base towards the wrist. The leaflets are drawn in fine, precise linework with some areas shaded more densely toward the stem and lower edge. Small dots trail along the outer edges of the frond, set against a pale skin tone and a textured white wall.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Forearm Fern Frond Leaf Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler at Hollin Mere always played the reel with his eyes shut, so nobody saw the fern come up through the floorboards that midsummer. It came through the gap by the stage where the boards had warped, a single frond uncurling as though it had been growing there for years. Ada Pell, who swept the hall in exchange for her bed, said it was the first green thing she had seen all winter, and she asked the fiddler to stop so she could look at it.

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He did not stop. Nobody danced on the fern, but they stepped round it, and by the second reel the young men were leaving sprigs of heather in the gap for luck. The frond grew tall enough to brush the lamp hooks. Its leaflets were drawn fine as pen strokes, and where the lamplight fell low across the whitewashed wall they threw shadows like lace, and small dark seeds dropped from its edges onto the boards.

On the last night of the dance, a stranger in a grey coat asked what the fern was for. Ada said nobody knew. The stranger told her the old people held that a fern rooted in a dance floor would keep the floor from ever standing empty, but only so long as someone kept dancing over the place where it grew. So the village took it in turns. Every night after that, one of them stepped slowly over the gap, and Ada took the step longest, until her knees gave out and her son took it from her.

The fern never grew past the lamp hooks, and it never once died back. Each morning its tip was turned towards the door, and the children of Hollin Mere learned to follow it home.