Woman taking a mirror selfie in a banana leaf print bandeau bikini, with a small dark tattoo on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mirror selfie with small upper arm tattoo

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on a white bed and takes a mirror selfie with a phone held over her face, so her face is hidden. A small dark tattoo sits on her upper arm, too small to show much detail. The image is warm and bright, with green leaf-print swimwear standing out against the white bedding and walls.

Upper arm Woman Bikini Bed Small tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The leaves had to be cut before the sun cleared the ridge, or they split when Auntie Pell folded them around the mackerel. She sent Tobi down to the grove with a blunt machete and a basket lined with wet sacking, and told him not to touch the young ones with the pale ribs, because those were for the priest's wife and would tear if you so much as looked at them.

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Tobi did not care about priests. He cared about the stamp. Every leaf that left Pell's stall carried a small dark mark pressed into its underside with a bone die dipped in lamp soot, a tiny fern no bigger than a thumbnail, so that buyers knew whose fish they were carrying home. Nobody else on the coast used it. When the rains came early that year, half the village's wrapping went green and rotten inside a day, and only Pell's parcels reached the dock still sweet.

The turn came when a clerk from the harbour office tried to buy the stamp for a company in the city. He offered coins for the die and a promise to print the fern on tins. Pell said the fern grew where it grew, and nobody could carry it off in a pocket. She gave him a leaf instead, folded so the mark showed, and told him to take it back to the city and see how long it stayed fresh.

Tobi kept the die. Years later, when he had a stall of his own at the far end of the market, he pressed the fern onto the first leaf he sold and watched the soot bloom dark into the vein. It was a small thing. The fish still went home wrapped, and the buyers still knew whose hands had made it.