Close photograph of a grey tribal-style tattoo with spiral and interlocking patterns across the back of a hand and up towards the wrist.

Tribal design across the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with a grey tattoo of spirals and interlocking tribal-style motifs runs from the wrist across the back of the hand and towards the base of the fingers. The linework is fine and the shading is flat grey, with the pattern tapering to a point near the knuckles. The hand wears a silver ring and pale pink nails against a plain white background.

Hand Hand Tribal pattern Spiral Ring Nail Wrist

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern came up through the cracked flags of the glasshouse path the spring after my father died, and nobody had planted it. Mum wanted it dug out before the frost. I said I would do it on Saturday, which is what I always said about things I did not want to touch.

Keep reading

Saturday came wet. I knelt with a trowel and followed the stem down, and the root went further than any root has a right to, crooked like bent wire, coiling back on itself where the old brick had split. Each new frond was rolled tight as a watch spring and only loosened when the rain got into it. I had read somewhere that a koru is a fern that never hurries, and I thought that was the sort of thing people say about ferns to feel better about their own slowness.

I did not dig it out. I found the tin of his seed packets in the potting shed, forty years of labels in his square capitals, and under them a pencil sketch of a frond, its tip curled into a spiral, with one word beside it: stay. He had never told me what he meant by it, and I had never asked.

The fern is still there. It greys at the edges each autumn and comes back every spring with its fists closed, the way it always has, while I stand in the doorway with a mug going cold and wait for it to open.