Solid black fern frond tattoo across the back of a hand and onto the wrist, botanical style, photographed against a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern tattoo on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A single fern frond is tattooed in solid black ink across the back of a hand, running from the base of the fingers down towards the wrist. The leaflets are filled in with dense black ink, giving a bold silhouette rather than fine detail. The hand and arm are shown against a plain pale background, with a thin gold ring on one finger.

Botanical Hand Fern Frond Leaves Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern grew only where the river bent under the old stone bridge, and Maud Tarrant knew it because her father had kept the barge Second Thrift tied in that bend for thirty years. When the spring floods came, the water rose over the towpath and left a green fringe along the bank, and in the fringe the ferns uncurled their heads like fists opening.

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In the year the lock keeper's boy drowned, nobody on the cut would speak of the bend. Maud took the Second Thrift down anyway, because the coal had to go to the mill at Stoke and there was no one else to take it. She cut a frond from the bank with her knife, the way her father had taught her to take a cutting for the stove, and she laid it on the cabin table to dry. By morning the leaflets had gone stiff and black with the damp of the cabin, sharp as the teeth of a comb.

She carried it up to the bridge at dusk and pressed it against the parapet, where the stone was warm from the day. The water below kept its own counsel. She stood there until the lamps came on in the lock cottage, then she went back down the steps, and when she reached the barge she found the frond had stuck to the back of her hand, its shadow printed dark across the knuckles. She did not try to wipe it off. In the morning the river was clear again, and she took the coal to Stoke.