Black and grey fern tattoo across a person's shoulder and upper arm, drawn with outlined fronds and soft shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern tattoo across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large fern frond runs down the upper arm from the shoulder, with smaller branching fronds spreading over the top of the shoulder. The linework is outlined with shading inside the leaflets, giving the leaves depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the photo is taken from the side with a plain wall and a grey top in the background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Fern Frond Leaves Plant

Find an artist for this

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

You have the Wardian case balanced on your knees before the branch-line train has finished sighing into Kirkby Stephen. The porter lifts a corner of the damp sacking, peers at what is inside, and whistles through his teeth. Forty fronds of hart's-tongue and polypody, packed in moss you cut from the wet north face of the viaduct at dawn, all of it waiting only for a warm window to finish the journey.

Keep reading

The stationmaster's wife has written to you twice, asking for a fern for the waiting room, so you carry it along the platform past the enamel signs and the smell of paraffin from the lamp room. The ticket clerk offers to take the weight. You refuse. Nobody else has ever understood how a frond must be carried, and you have learned that a leaf bruised in transit goes brown by Tuesday.

By the time you reach the ticket hall the glass has fogged from the inside. A single crozier has pushed up through the moss and is uncoiling, slow as a clock hand, pale green against the grey lid. You set the case on the bench and lift the lid an inch to let the air in. The fern leans toward the light from the high station clock, then keeps on leaning, spilling over the edge of the case and along the wooden bench, so that the stationmaster finds a stem of it curled round the leg of his chair when he comes out to check the timetable.

You tell him it is only a fern. He does not argue. Outside, the eleven-forty pulls away for Penrith, and you notice that the frond has already crossed the floor to the waiting room door, pinned to the boards in neat, overlapping leaflets, as if it means to stay.