Black fine-line fern sprig tattoo curving across the upper arm of a woman with long hair seated on a white bed.

Fern sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, seated on a white bed with her hair falling down her back. A single black botanical sprig, with feathery fronds curving along the outer upper arm, is the clear focus. The soft-focus background of white bedding and a brick wall keeps attention on the single-colour linework.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Fern Sprig Leaves Foliage Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell's boarding house at Lyme-on-Sea smelled of wet wool and vinegar, and Iris had claimed the back bedroom for her fern case because the light fell long across its sill. She had carried the glass box from Bath on her knees, wrapped in a blanket, and each evening she lifted the lid and checked the moss beneath every frond the way her father checked his barometer.

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The ferns grew on the cliff path above the town, in the damp crevices where the chalk wept. Each morning she climbed with a trowel and a tin, and each morning the sea had taken another yard of the path. Hollis, the lodger across the landing, carried the tin without being asked and talked about the lighthouse keeper's accounts. He never once looked at the ferns long enough to see them.

On the last Sunday of August she found a sprig that curved like a hand lifting a teacup, its pinnae combed neatly along one side. She pressed it between the pages of the family Bible at the Book of Ruth, meaning to post it to her aunt. When she came down to breakfast the tin sat open on the sideboard, and Hollis had set the sprig in a jam jar on the windowsill with a pencilled note beside it: It will want the damp.

She left it there. By the time the boarding house emptied for winter, a tight green curl had unfurled from the cut stem, and the sprig leaned against the glass as if it had decided which way the light was coming.