Black and grey ink drawing of a scorpion with a raised tail, framed by fern fronds and plant sprigs, with the word Scorpio and a short quote beneath.

Scorpio scorpion with ferns

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a scorpion with its tail curled upward and its pincers open, surrounded by fern fronds, grasses and fine sprigs with small dots scattered around. The linework is crisp and varied, with hatching and stippling used to shade the segmented body and the curved fronds. The design is printed on a plain white background, with the title Scorpio in capitals and a two-line italic quote set below the drawing.

Botanical Scorpion Zodiac Fern Plant Grass Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's small tonight and the wind comes under the door like a thief. Brother Aldric kept the physic garden below the east wall, and he kept it the way some men keep a grudge, carefully and for years. He pulled bindweed by hand. He would not let the abbot's boy cut the ferns by the cistern, because ferns had been there before the first stone of this house and would be there after the last. One October he found a scorpion curled in the rosemary, and he did not kill it. He called it Brother Vesper and fed it crumbs from his sleeve.

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The brothers said he had gone soft in the head. Brother Vesper's tail rose over the herb beds like a question no one would answer. Each evening the old man crouched by the cistern with his hands on his knees and talked to the creature about the price of lamp oil and the weather in Lent. The scorpion listened, or seemed to, its pincers open as if it were about to pray or to argue.

Then the frost came early and hard. The abbot ordered the garden ploughed under before Candlemas, and the boy came with the mattock. Aldric stood in the path. He said nothing clever. He only held his hands out, palms up, the way you hold out a bowl. The boy stopped. The cold went on doing its work all night, and by morning the rosemary was black and the scorpion was gone, but the ferns had kept their green curled hearts under the leaf litter, as ferns do.

In spring the abbot walked the garden himself and found Aldric on his knees by the cistern, not praying, only looking. The old man said the world had done what it always does, and that he had simply been slow to notice. Then he stood, brushed the soil from his habit, and went to fetch the spade.