Fine line black fern leaf inside a thin circle on the side of a woman's neck, with her dark hair falling across a white pillow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern leaf in a circle on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a fern frond sits inside a thin outlined circle on the side of the neck. The linework is delicate and even, with the leaflets drawn as a simple solid silhouette and no visible shading. The image is a close, softly lit photo of a person lying on a pillow, with the tattoo as the clear focal point against warm skin.

Fine line Botanical Neck Fern Leaf Frond 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

Pull your stool closer, and mind the cat, she has no manners about where she sits. You want the story of the Hollin ring, the one the old wives told before the mill closed. Past the last gate of Ashby Fold there is a clearing ringed by bracken so tall a man could lose his hat in it, and in the middle of the ring grows one fern on its own.

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Sixty winters back, a carter called Tobias Wren went up the lane with a load of slate in the fog. The fog came down thick as wet wool, and he could not see his own horse's ears. His wife, Maud, stood at the gate with a lantern and a hazel hoop she had been weaving all afternoon. She pushed a frond of fern through the hoop, tied it with red thread, and held it up toward the trees. "Follow the leaf," she said, "it knows the way home."

He did. The fronds in the hoop turned a little each time the wind moved, and the lantern light caught the small dark leaflets, each one as neat and even as stitching on a good coat. Whenever he drifted toward the bog, the leaf dipped left. Whenever he drifted toward the ditch, it lifted. When the slate wagon finally rolled over the cobbles, Maud was still standing there, the hoop in both hands, the thread gone grey with damp.

Tobias kept that hoop above the mantel until the day he died. Some folk say the leaf was only a leaf, and the hoop only hazel. Doubt them if you like. The bracken in that clearing still curls in a ring each spring, and at first light you'll find one frond standing straight in the centre, pointing home.