Fine line black fern tattoo with a red midrib on the inner forearm, shown in two photographs with a striped sleeve pushed up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern tattoo on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A diptych of two photographs showing the same fern frond tattooed on the inner forearm. The fine, delicate linework builds the leaflets with dark shading, and a thin reddish line runs down the central stem. The left image is a close crop with the sleeve rolled above the tattoo, while the right shows the arm against a plain, dim background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The rain came in sideways again this morning, so the stall at Wensley Market was a sorry sight: wet cloths, a tin of dead batteries and me under a tarpaulin pretending the ferns I sell in jam jars were not drooping. You would have laughed. Mrs Oakes from the flower end bought three bunches of bracken for her porch and told me I looked like a drowned crow.

Yesterday I finally opened Mum's pressing book. You know the one, with the brown card covers and the page of ferns she made the summer before you were born. Between the pages I found a single frond, flat as a biscuit, its stem drawn down the middle with a red pen so fine it looked like a hair. Every other leaflet has faded to the colour of stewed tea. The red line is still sharp.

I sat on the upturned crate and thought about her hand, steady over the paper, and how she must have tried to keep that stem straight. I don't know why she marked it. Maybe it was the one she could not bear to flatten, or maybe it was the one she meant to bring to you.

I have put the frond in an envelope with this letter. Hold it up to the window when the light comes in. The stem still runs straight through the leaves, and the rain, for once, can't get at it.

Love, Jo

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