Black and grey fern frond tattoo on the upper back of a model in a sheer lace gown with a deep V back.

Fern tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A model is photographed from behind on a runway, showing a black and grey tattoo of a fern-like frond running down the centre of the upper back. The linework is fine and the leaflets are shaded with grey tones, set against pale skin visible through the open back of a lace gown. The composition is tall and narrow, with the tattoo as the focal point and a blurred crowd and greenery behind.

Botanical Fine line Back Fern Frond Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Palais has already started the second waltz when the hem catches on the brass rail, and you are the one who kneels to free it, pins held between your teeth. Nobody else in the cloakroom knows the lace was your mother's, dyed the colour of weak tea and sewn by hand over one hard winter in Tooting. Mr Hadley says it will fetch more if the back is open, so you cut the bodice low and trace the frond with a stub of charcoal, the one you carried home from the Winterbourne glasshouse in your apron pocket at nine years old.

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Your father was an under-gardener there. He told you ferns were older than flowers, that they had been unfurling in the damp long before anything bothered to be pretty. You pressed one in the family Bible between Ruth and Samuel, and when you opened it years later the green had left a ghost on the page, pale as a thumbprint on glass.

Tonight you stand at the edge of the floor and watch the couples turn under the mirror ball. A young man in a borrowed collar asks you to partner him. You tell him you are working, and he asks what you are stitching, and you say nothing, only that the thread needs time to set. He laughs and goes off to find someone who will say yes.

When the last tune finishes, the lamps are dimmed and the girl in the gown turns once more by the stage door. The charcoal lines catch the light from the exit sign, and the leaflets seem to open down her back, grey as rain on slate. Let them look at the back, you think. The fern was never meant to face the room.