Two black and grey botanical fern tattoos with fine linework, one on each forearm, with both hands raised against a pale grey background.

Fern tattoos on both forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with large fern fronds tattooed in black ink, one on each arm, running from the wrist towards the elbow. The leaflets are drawn with fine outlines and stippled shading that gives them depth and texture, and the central stems are drawn as single clean lines. The image is in black and grey only, with the hands raised above the arms against a plain pale background.

Botanical Forearm Fern Leaf Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern had come up overnight along the north wall of the orchard, which was wrong, because nothing ferns in the last week of August. Ada Pryce went out with the billhook to cut it back before the wasps found the windfalls, and she stopped at the first frond because it stood taller than her hip. Each leaflet was cut fine as a feather and shaded darker toward the midrib, and the stem ran up through the grass as one clean line, as if someone had ruled it with a pencil and a steady hand.

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Her grandmother had a saying for ferns that came in the wrong season. A road someone has left open, she said, and you will walk it whether you mean to or not. Ada had heard it the way children hear everything grandmothers say, which is to say not at all, but she followed the stem anyway, past the Bramley rows and over the stile where the stream bends, down into the hollow where the old cider press stood with its beam gone grey. The fronds grew thicker there, and every one of them leaned the same way, toward the spring.

At the spring she found her father's tobacco tin, the one he kept after he gave up smoking, and inside were fern fronds pressed flat between sheets of the parish newsletter, each dated in pencil. Ada understood then that he had never been lost in the orchard, only watching for the season when she would need the way home. She cut one frond, tied it to the gatepost with a length of twine, and walked back along the stem with the leaves brushing her wrist, not once looking down.