Small black botanical tattoo of a fern frond on the back of an upper arm, with a rolled grey sleeve above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern frond on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black fern frond sits on the back of an upper arm, with the leaflets drawn in dark ink and the stem running diagonally from the lower left to the upper right. The tattoo is shaded in solid black and fine detail, set against pale skin. The wearer's grey speckled top with a rolled sleeve fills the right side of the frame, and a plain light wall forms the background.

Botanical Upper arm Fern Frond Leaf Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw had not come to Lowdale Fold by Candlemas, and Ruth Pennock was still breaking the skin of ice on the horse trough when the grey hen came walking up the lane as if she owned it. Her father had said the hen was a witch's bird. Ruth said nothing, because her father had said a great many things since the hay ran short.

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The hen stopped at the gate and dropped a single fern frond onto the snow, dark green and pressed flat as a letter. "Take that to the edge of the wood," the hen said, "and lay it under the oldest holly. Point the stem to the sunrise, and say nothing on the way back." Ruth asked what the frond would buy. "A week of warm mornings for your ewes, and a small thing you will not miss."

She went. The holly stood in the drifts like a man who had forgotten his coat. She laid the frond with its stem to the east, and the snow beneath it softened, and a green shoot unrolled from the leaves in a curl like a fist opening. She walked home without looking back, though the wind called her name twice in her mother's voice.

By morning the ewes were up and bleating, the trough was open water, and her father stood at the byre door turning his hat in his hands, wondering aloud who had been at the hay. Ruth never told him. Each February after, she pressed a frond between the pages of the almanac and kept the warm weeks in it, the way other families keep a coin.