Black ink tattoo of a forest floor with morel, chanterelle and oyster mushrooms, a beetle and a slug, in botanical linework and dotwork on the upper arm.

Forest floor with mushrooms and beetle on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woodland floor with several mushrooms, including a tall morel, chanterelles and clustered oyster fungi, along with a beetle in flight, a slug and a small pebble. The design uses clean black outlines with fine hatching on the ground and stippled dots for soil and texture. It is entirely in black ink and covers the upper arm and shoulder area, filling the frame from top to bottom.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Mushroom Beetle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had the morels pegged before the ground was dry enough to walk on. Three weeks of April rain had left the field behind the Harrow Lane showground soft and pocked, and on the second morning she found the first one standing in the ditch by the generator trailer, grey-brown and honeycombed like a sponge somebody had left out to dry. She cut it at the base with her penknife and put it in her apron pocket, where it sat warm against her hip for the rest of the set-up.

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Her father ran the dodgems and had no patience for anything that did not pay by the hour. "They're just toadstools with ideas," he said, watching her crouch in the wet grass at the edge of the car park. But by the Thursday she had a tea towel full of them, and the chanterelles had come up under the oak line, yellow as spilt yolk and smelling of apricots. A beetle the colour of wet slate sat on the gate post and watched her with the patience of a stall owner. She let it be.

The slug was the problem. It had crossed the path between the big wheel and the candyfloss van and was making slow, deliberate progress towards her boot. She moved it on with a stick, and it left a silver trail across the gravel, like the ghost of a lettuce.

On the last night, when the lights came down and the trailers were hitched, she walked back to the oak and found a ring of oyster mushrooms growing on the stump where the old swing boat had been bolted. Nobody had told her that fungi kept time. She sat on the stump, pressed her thumb into the cold dirt, and counted the pebbles in her pocket: eleven. She put the twelfth, a white quartz no bigger than a thumbnail, back on the ground and left it there to mark the spot.