Black blackwork tattoo on a forearm of marching soldier silhouettes forming a silver fern leaf, with the words Lest We Forget beneath.

Soldiers silhouette on fern leaf

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of soldiers in single file forms the body of a silver fern leaf, with the figures shown in profile and some appearing to kneel or lie at the base. Beneath the design, the words Lest We Forget are set in a serif script. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of a fresh or recently healed piece in black ink only, with the leaf filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Silhouette Fern Leaf Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Private Tom Reddaway counted the men by the sound of their boots, because in the scrub above the creek nobody could see further than the man in front. Nine of them, single file, following the pale undersides of the ferns the sergeant had told them to watch for. Silver side up meant the track went left. Green side up meant the track went nowhere, and most of the boys had learned that the hard way on the first night.

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By the third morning the line had thinned. Corporal Ilse Marr, who had kept the map in her breast pocket since Wellington, stopped beside a fallen totara and said they would rest, though nobody sat. She took the map out, looked at it for a long while, then folded it and put it away again. "Doesn't matter where we are," she said. "Only which way the fern's turned."

They went on. Reddaway remembered the ones who knelt to tie their boots and did not rise, and the ones who lay down in the shade and asked to be left a minute. He remembered that the line bent and straightened without anyone giving the order, the way a frond unrolls. When the scrub finally opened onto a ridge, the sun came through the leaves and turned every blade of fern to silver, and for a moment the men walking ahead looked like nothing but black cut-outs against the light.

Reddaway never told his children the fern had led them home. He said only that they walked in a line and kept it, and that the ground had been kind enough to show them the way.