Black and grey blackwork tattoo of ruffled fungi filling a triangle on the inner forearm, shown against a white brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fungi inside a triangle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A triangle on the inner forearm is filled with overlapping, fan-shaped fungal forms that look like mushroom gills or bracket fungi. The work is built from fine black linework and stippled shading, giving the forms depth and texture. The tattoo is in black and grey, and the triangle sits centred on the arm against a pale background.

Botanical Blackwork Forearm Mushroom Triangle Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third plate came off the hull of the Marrow Gull with a sound like a wet envelope tearing, and I caught it against my chest before it could hit the grit. Corrin, who had been foreman on the salvage crew for longer than I had been alive, took one look and told me to mind the spores. We both knew the rule. Every rib of that old ship had rotted into a triangle, and every triangle had grown the same pale fungus, fan over fan, like a stack of unopened umbrellas.

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We worked the plates under the lamp in the afternoons. Each gill was finer than a hair, and the shading came from thousands of dots where the spores had dusted the surface. Corrin said you could read the age of a colony by counting the overlaps. This one had at least forty years in it. The company paid us by the plate, so we counted gills the way other people count money, and I started to think of the whole ship as a ledger the moon had been keeping for us.

This plate was different. Every gill on it leaned the same way, toward the broken hatch, as if the fungus had been waiting for someone to come up the ramp. Corrin wanted it crushed for the sale. I didn't say anything, but I kept my hand over it when he wasn't looking.

At dusk I carried it up the ridge in the crook of my arm, gills open to the sky, and set it down on the stone where the first light would reach it in the morning. Behind me the crew packed the lamps. Nobody asked me why I did it, and I didn't have a good answer. The plate didn't need one.