Black tribal-style design of a fern frond with spiral and hatched motifs, drawn on a plain white background, with no body placement shown.

Tribal fern frond design in black

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black design of a curved, fern-like frond with a central spine and tapering side branches. Curling spirals sit at the tips and along the edges, and the fills use solid black shapes alongside fine hatched and lattice patterns. The design is shown in black on white with no skin, body part or colour ink visible.

Blackwork Fern Frond Spiral Tribal Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fern came aboard in a tin trunk at Lyttelton, wrapped in oilcloth, and my father never once let anyone else carry it. He said it was a cutting from the hills behind his mother's farm, and that a frond ought to be kept the way you keep a letter, folded and dry. By the time we raised the Horn I had heard the story four times, each time with a different number of hills.

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The ship was the Maud Rennick, three hundred tons of tired teak, and she rolled like a drunk clerk in the Roaring Forties. Somewhere past the fortieth parallel the cook's boy stopped sleeping in his hammock and started sleeping under the galley table. I took the watch from the bosun's mate that winter because nobody else would climb the foretop in the dark with the spray coming sideways. Up there, with the sail drumming, I used to trace the curl of the frond on the back of my hand with a blunt pencil, because it was the only thing aboard that made any sense to me.

On the nineteenth day of the Horn the wind dropped for an hour and the sea went flat as a slate. My father came up with the trunk under his arm and unwrapped the frond on the hatch cover. It was not green any more, only a brown ribbed skeleton, but the curls at its tips had held. He pointed at the fine lattice on each leaflet and said that was how the old women had shown the way home, the spirals counting the miles.

We lost the cutting overboard the next morning in a squall, trunk and all. My father never spoke of it again. But when we reached Valparaíso I found I could still draw the frond from memory, spine and spiral and lattice, and I drew it on the back of a customs form and gave it to him. He folded it twice and put it in his breast pocket, where it stayed.