Black ink tattoo on skin of a silver fern leaf formed from marching soldier silhouettes, with the script words Lest we forget beneath it.

Silver fern of marching soldiers with Lest we forget

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a silver fern frond, with the leaf's segments formed from silhouetted figures in military dress, some standing and marching and others lying down near the stem. Below the leaf, the script words Lest we forget run diagonally. The work is solid black ink with no grey shading or colour, and the image is a close-up that shows the design across a area of skin.

Blackwork Other Silhouette Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell came up the lane with the travelling fair every October, pulling a handcart of pressed ferns, and she never once charged a child who had lost someone. Her own boy had gone with the men from over the water, and nobody in Ashcombe had seen him since.

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One wet evening a lad named Owen Carrick came to her stall with a soldier's cap in his hands. He wanted to know if a fern could be made to walk. She told him ferns walked in their own way, a little each year, out along the bank where the shade was. Then she lifted the frond she kept under glass, the one she had picked from a hillside she would not name, and he saw that the leaf was made of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, their rifles slanted like the veins.

"Those are the ones who came back," she said, and she pointed to the figures lying low along the stalk. "And those keep the stem alive. Without them the leaf would have nothing to hold it up."

Owen did not understand her, but he took the cap home and planted a fern in the hedge the next spring. The following October Mrs Pell was gone from the fairground. Her handcart stood empty by the gate with the glass lid propped open, and a single dry frond lay on the seat, its last figure marching off the edge of the leaf.