Close view of a black fern leaf tattoo on the upper arm of a person wearing a grey patterned T-shirt with rolled sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern leaf tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black fern frond is tattooed on the outer upper arm, with its central stem running diagonally and small leaflets along both sides. The linework is solid black with simple tonal detail, and the image is in black and grey with no colour ink. The soft grey background and rolled patterned sleeve frame the tattoo at the centre of the composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You scrub the last of the porridge pot at four bells, the galley lamp swinging on its hook, and the frond is still tucked inside the flour tin where you hid it at Kawau Bay. Mr Pennock, the bosun, thinks you keep a rosary in there. You let him think it.

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The Marigold has been eleven weeks out of Auckland with salt pork, hard tack and a crate of hens that refuse to lay. Every morning you open the tin and check the leaflets, still flat and papery, still the dark green of a wet ditch. The surgeon asked what it was and you said a fern, which was true, and didn't say that it grew on a hillside where a girl called Aroha showed you how to split the stem with your thumbnail so it would curl.

Off the Horn the weather turned, and for three days you served nothing but cold biscuit while the hull groaned. On the fourth morning the sea lay flat as a plate and you found the flour tin had shipped water in the night. The frond had gone to paper, its veins still visible, its colour gone to the grey of old ash. You lifted it free with a knife, as careful as a surgeon, and laid it on the warm range rail to dry.

When the Marigold raised the Thames six weeks later, you handed the frond to the purser's boy as a sort of receipt for the flour. He turned it over and asked what it was for. You told him it was for remembering a place, then collected your wages and went ashore to find out whether the place was still there.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.