Black and white photo of a fine line fern frond tattoo on the side of the ribs, with a hand resting over the chest above it.

Fine line fern frond on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small fern or feather-like frond is outlined in fine black linework on the side of the ribs, with a curled spiral at the tip. The lines are single and even, and the tattoo is unshaded, so the design relies on the outline alone. The photograph is black and white and taken close up, with a hand and wristwatch resting at the top of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Fern Frond Feather Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern unrolled itself every spring on the hill above Harrowgate, and my grandmother said that was how you knew the year had turned over. Her brother Tom had carried a single frond in his pocket the summer he went to the mill towns to find work, and when the letters stopped she pressed another one flat inside the family Bible and told us nobody could say a fern was dead until its curl had gone brown all the way through.

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The dance hall they had in those days stood by the canal, a tin-roofed place with a sprung floor that rolled like the deck of a barge. On Saturdays the lads came in from the pits with their hair slicked down, and the girls wore their mothers' brooches. Tom danced only the once with Nell Carrick, a slow waltz that the fiddler stretched out longer than anyone wanted, and she asked him where he meant to go when the hall closed. He said he would follow the water until it stopped being water.

He went. The canal ran eleven miles past the last of the chimneys, and then it ran out in a field of bracken where nobody had a use for it. Nell waited at the dance hall door every Saturday until the year the roof came down in a storm, and after that she waited at the window of the tea shop instead.

The spiral on the frond curls inward, my grandmother always said, because a fern is folding itself back toward the ground it came from. Tom came home the winter the bracken was cut, and he never said where he had been. He only asked Nell if the hall's old floor was still standing, and when she said it had been pulled up for firewood, he laughed until he had to sit down on the step.