Small black fine line tattoo of a fern frond inside a thin circle, placed on the upper back near the shoulder.

Fern inside a circle on the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a fern frond sits inside a thin outlined circle, with the frond angled diagonally from upper left to lower right. The linework is fine and even, with the leaflets drawn in dark ink and no shading. The photo is warm toned, showing a person lying on a white pillow with long dark hair falling across the upper body, and the tattoo sits on the bare skin of the upper back and shoulder.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Fern Frond Leaf Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Hester, you will laugh, but Mr Lowther has finally paid his bill, and he paid it in ferns. Four weeks he has been at Number Nine, up before the gulls every morning with his tin box and his magnifying glass, and last night he came down to the kitchen with a sheet of paper and asked Mrs Pascoe to look at it. It was a single frond, drawn so finely I could count the leaflets, and round it a plain thin circle, as though he had caught the plant mid-breath under a bell jar.

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I asked him why a circle. He said a fern in the open is always trying to be somewhere else, uncurling towards a light it cannot quite reach, and a ring keeps it still long enough to be looked at. I told him that was the most nonsense I had heard since the curate's sermon, and he agreed with me, and then he asked whether I would hold the frond steady while he drew the second one.

So I did. We sat by the range until the candle guttered. He drew, I watched his hand, and every so often he would say "there" as a leaflet fell into place. Mrs Pascoe thinks he is courting me. He is not. He is a man who has lost his wife's garden and is trying to draw it back one frond at a time, and I found I did not mind holding still for him.

He leaves on Saturday for the train to Bodmin. This morning I found the sheet on the hall table, with a note: "For the room you gave me, so it stays looked after." Under the circle he had written, very small, "Keep it turning." I have pinned it above the washstand. Come in August and see it. The damp has got into the frame already, but the fern is holding fast.