Two black and grey fern frond tattoos, one on each forearm, shown against a background of green ferns.

Fern tattoos on both forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two raised hands, palms angled up, display matching fern frond tattoos running from the wrists up the inner forearms. The fronds are drawn with fine, detailed linework and stippled shading that gives the leaflets depth and texture. The palette is entirely black and grey on pale skin, set against dense green fern foliage that sits behind the subject.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Forearm Hand Fern Frond Leaf Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Tindall kept her drawing book on the sill above the sink at Hollin Cottage. Every spring she walked up the beck with a pencil and came back with one frond cut short at the stalk, and nobody in the valley could say why she bothered with ferns when foxgloves and hawthorn were there for the taking. The fern she wanted grew only in the damp under the quarry wall, where the stone wept all year.

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Her grandson Ned came to stay the summer his mother took a post in Leeds. He was clumsy with a pen, so she gave him a fine steel nib and told him to count the leaflets instead of drawing them. "Dots are patient," she said. "Lines lie about how the light gets in." He spent a week on a single frond, dot by dot, until his wrist ached and the thing began to sit on the paper the way the real one sat on the bank.

In August the quarry men cut a new seam and the wall came down in a grey slide. The beck choked and the fern was buried under scree. Ned walked up with his book, found nothing but stone, and sat on a boulder drawing from memory. When he got home she looked at the sheet, turned it over, and said it was too neat. "Fern isn't neat. It just keeps going."

The following April a single frond pushed up through the rubble, pale as a hand held to a window. Ned cut it and carried it home in wet newspaper. His grandmother dipped a needle in ink and pricked the frond into the inside of his forearm, dot by dot, so the quarry could never bury it again. By morning the skin had stopped stinging, and it was the first thing he ever kept that the stone could not take.