Black tattoo of a silver fern frond with a line of marching figure silhouettes and the words Lest we forget in script.

Silver fern with marching figures and script

Blackwork · Black and grey · Photo

A silver fern frond forms the backdrop, with a row of solid black figure silhouettes walking along its length, several wearing hats. The fern and figures are filled in solid black with clean edges, while the script text Lest we forget runs diagonally beneath the leaf. The tattoo is black ink only, photographed closely on skin with reasonable sharpness.

Blackwork Lettering Fern Silhouette Figure Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the chisel in one hand and the list in the other when he stopped, which is how I knew something was wrong before he said a word. The stone had come up on the lorry from Dunedin in March, grey and cold as a church step, and for three weeks he had been cutting the names of Harrow Creek's dead into it one letter at a time. Each cut he rubbed with lamp black so the names would read from the road.

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"There's one missing," he said, and held the paper out to me. Mrs Ainsley had come by the yard on Tuesday with a photograph in a brown envelope: a line of men in slouch hats on a dirt road, all of them walking away from the camera except one, who had turned to look back. She wanted her boy's name at the foot of the list, under the fern, where there was room. "She says he came home," Dad said. "Then she says he didn't. I don't know which one to cut."

I took the photograph from his hand. The boy at the back, third from the end, was grinning, one arm lifted as if he meant to wave someone on. I thought of the fern pressed flat in the Ainsleys' front window, the one Mrs Ainsley kept in a book every autumn, its leaflets all turned the same way like they were climbing a hill together.

Dad set the chisel to the stone and cut the boy's name very small, at the bottom of the list, just past the last fern tip where the granite was still rough. "Lest we forget," I read aloud. He wiped the lamp black across the letters with his thumb, looked at it for a long while, and then said, "Forget what, exactly?" and went back to work.