Black and grey botanical tattoo on a forearm with a long fern frond, pine cones, a dotted dahlia-like bloom, leaves and small crystals.

Fern, pine cones and crystals on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long fern frond runs diagonally along the forearm, with pine cones, a large dahlia-like flower inside a dotted circle, leaves, seed heads and small faceted crystals arranged around it. The linework is clean and dark, with shading and stippling on the pine cones, flower and seed heads. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain light background.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Fern Pine cone Flower Dahlia Leaf Seed head Crystal Dotted circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern had been pressed too long, and Ada Mercer knew it before she lifted the board. Its pinnae had gone the colour of wet slate, and the crystals that had come up with the root were sweating on the newsprint like tiny cold lamps. She had carried the whole bundle down from the limestone scar above Scarrow Gill the previous afternoon, past three farmers who asked what she had dug up and would not look at the bag.

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She set the frond on the drying rack beside the pine cones, which had opened overnight though the room was dry as paper. Their scales lifted like hinges. The dahlia-shaped head sat within its dotted ring on the bench, and when she bent to count the stippled petals, the seed heads along the stem began to split one by one, soft as dandelion clocks, each seed settling in its own small drift of dust. Ada wrote the numbers down. Nine petals. Eleven seeds. Then, in a smaller hand, she wrote that the numbers kept changing whenever she looked away.

The crystals were the real trouble. Every faceted point leaned toward the window, and at four o'clock the corridor clock stopped with its hands pointing at the gill. Her supervisor would call it damp and mould. Ada knew better, and she took the bag back out before the grey came up over the moor road, the cold grit still clinging to her fingers.

She set the fern back in the gill at first light, pressing the frond against the rock so its leaves matched their own shadow. The pine cones stayed closed in her coat pocket. When she looked back from the stile, the frond had already greened along its midrib, and a single dewdrop hung at the tip of every leaf, each one holding the sun.