Close-up of a grey botanical tattoo of a fern-like sprig running vertically across a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Fern sprig on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical sprig of fern-like foliage is tattooed on the upper back, running down from the base of the neck toward the shoulder blade. The leaflets are filled with soft grey and blue-grey shading, with darker tones at the top of the sprig fading lighter toward the stem's tip. The camera is close to the skin in natural daylight, with hair falling over the top of the frame and a blurred green background.

Botanical Back Fern Sprig Leaves Foliage Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule sat down twice before we reached the cairn at Ravenscar Gap, and by then the rain had soaked the ferns in my satchel to the colour of wet slate. Uncle Tom said they were only bracken's poor relations and not worth carrying, but I had promised Mother a sprig of the rock fern that grows only where the old packhorse road crosses the scree.

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We found it on the north face, where the sun gives up before three o'clock. The fronds were grey-blue in the shade, darker at the crown and paling toward the stem, the way a hill looks when the cloud lifts off it. I cut one sprig with my penknife and wrapped it in a page torn from Father's survey book, the one with the spring marked in red ink that appears on no map now.

Tom laughed at me for kneeling in the wet. He took the mule's rope and walked on ahead, singing the drovers' song about a girl in Kendal who never came down from the fells. I thought about the spring too, and whether a fern that only grows beside water could be trusted to find its way back to a valley where nobody remembered the road.

When we reached the farm at dusk, Mother unwrapped the page, pressed the sprig flat between two window panes, and held it up to the last of the light. The stem was still green at the tip. Tom said nothing, and neither did I, but she propped the glass against the kitchen wall where the lamp could reach it, and for the first time since the fire the house smelled of rain on stone.