Black and grey botanical tattoo of poppy flowers and fern fronds on the forearm, shown from two angles.

Poppy and fern forearm tattoo

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large poppy-style flower with a dotted centre and layered petals, with a sprig of feathery fern fronds trailing down the forearm towards the wrist. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading and fine dot stippling used to give the petals and leaves depth. Two photographs side by side show the same arm from different angles against a plain dark background.

Botanical Forearm Poppy Flower Fern Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Billy brought the fern home in his snap tin the week the screens closed, wrapped in a page of the Chronicle. It was a slab of grey shale no bigger than a biscuit, and pressed into it, neat as handwriting, was a frond that had grown when this whole valley was swamp. He'd found it on the tip behind Harrow Pit, where the tubs tip the stone out at dawn. The screens man had told him it was three hundred million years old. I never trusted the screens man, but I believed that.

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Mam kept it on the mantel beside the clock. In June the poppies came up on the heap, orange as struck matches, seeded from somebody's garden. She said they only grew where the ground had been turned over and not given back. She cut them for the table and they dropped their petals by teatime, and she swept them up without complaint.

The night before Billy left for the south, I took the shale down and carried it up the path in my slippers. The moon made the spoil look like a grey sea. I found the first poppy of the year bent out of a crack in the cinders, and I knelt and set the stone against its roots, fern side up, the way you'd leave a letter for someone who might come back for it.

In the morning the frond was still there, pressed a finger's depth into the cinders, and the poppy had opened wide above it, dark at the heart as the seam. Mam found me on my knees and said nothing. She only went back for the trowel.