Black botanical tattoo of a fern frond with a curled stem on the upper arm of a woman in a black top, against a graffiti wall.

Fern frond tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single fern frond runs diagonally along the upper arm, with a thin curled stem and pinnae that taper towards the tip. The leaflets are filled in with black ink and soft grey shading, giving the frond some depth. The arm is raised across the frame, with a blurred graffiti wall and a black top behind it.

Botanical Upper arm Fern Frond Leaf Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last fern in the gully had been nibbled by sheep, or so Margaret Ash decided, because it was the only explanation she was willing to write down. She knelt on the wet shale at the foot of the pass with her vasculum open and her skirt soaking through at the knee, counting the stubs where the fronds had been. Eleven stubs. Her brother would have called the morning wasted, as he called most mornings wasted that did not end in a ledger.

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Idris Pryce, who carried her case up every slope between Llanberis and the lake, stood at the lip of the gully with his cap pushed back and watched the cloud come down over the ridge. 'Weather's turning, Miss Ash.'

'Then it will turn without me.' Under a slab the rain had polished black she had found a single frond the sheep had missed. It was still curled at its root into a tight crozier, the way a thing curls before it has decided to be a plant. She cut it free with her penknife and laid it between blotting paper, its pinnae tapering to points so fine they seemed drawn rather than grown.

That night she pressed it flat under a Bible at the inn. In the morning she drew it again in ink, leaflets filled solid where the light did not reach, then washed grey beneath each one where the shadow fell. Idris came up before breakfast to see it, which he had never done before. He looked a long while. 'It's the same fern,' he said at last. 'Only darker.'

She did not correct him. She tucked the drawing into her notebook beside the eleven stubs and left the curl at the stem unfinished, so the frond could go on unrolling in her hands.