Fern Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a fern tattoo means

The fiddlehead is the heart of it. A new fern frond does not open the way a leaf does; it uncoils from a tight spiral, a habit botanists call circinate vernation, and that slow unrolling is what most fern tattoos are about. It is a beginning that takes its time, growth you can watch happen, and it is why people mark a new start, a child or a recovery with a fern rather than with a flower, which arrives already open.

In New Zealand that spiral is the koru, taken from the unfurling frond of the silver fern, and it stands for new life, growth and peace. The koru runs through the country's everyday design, Air New Zealand has flown one on its tails since the 1970s, and a fern spiral is not a restricted image. Tā moko is different. It is the Māori marking in which koru forms also appear, it records whakapapa, a person's genealogy, and it is not something to lift from somebody else's skin.

The silver fern itself is a national emblem. Its fronds are silver-white underneath, the All Blacks and many other national teams wear it, and for a New Zealander abroad a fern is close to a flag. Anyone else wearing one should expect to be asked whether they are from there.

Age supplies the other reading. Ferns were growing more than 350 million years ago, long before the first flowering plant, and the coal of the Carboniferous is partly made of them. They have no seeds and no flowers; they spread by spores shed from the brown dots on the underside of each frond. That makes a fern the botanical tattoo for someone who wants growth without romance: no bloom, no fruit, only a plant that keeps coming back in the shade.

Folklore turned the missing flower into magic. Because nobody could find fern seed, it was said to make its holder invisible, a belief Shakespeare jokes about in Henry IV, Part 1. In Slavic tradition the fern blooms for a single night, on Kupala Night at midsummer, and whoever finds the flower finds luck. Both stories are about looking for something that does not exist, which is its own reason to wear one.

Where the design comes from

Britain had a fern craze. From the 1840s ferns became a Victorian obsession: collected on country walks, pressed into albums, grown in the sealed glass cases Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward had devised, cast into iron garden benches and printed on pottery. Charles Kingsley named it pteridomania in 1855. The pressed specimen, laid flat with every leaflet spread, is the direct ancestor of the botanical sketch of a fern, and the fossil imprint is its geological cousin, a frond preserved in shale from the coal measures. New Zealand's claim is older in spirit and has lasted longer. A silver fern was worn by the New Zealand Native team that toured Britain in 1888, and the fern later went onto the Commonwealth headstones of the country's war dead, which is part of why New Zealanders read it as belonging rather than as decoration.

Choosing yours

• Count and taper. A frond is one unit repeated, dozens of leaflets on each side of the stem, and they have to shrink steadily toward the tip or the frond turns into a feather or a comb. That taper is what makes it read as a fern, and it survives every style, from geometric facets to one continuous line.
• Size is a thinning problem rather than a shrinking one. Each leaflet has its own serrated edge, and below about 8 cm those edges, and the gaps between leaflets, begin to close as the ink settles. The answer is fewer and larger leaflets, not the full frond made smaller. A lone fiddlehead is the exception and holds very small, because it is a single spiral line.
• Name the fern. Maidenhair has fan-shaped leaflets on black, wiry stems; the silver fern has long blades and a pale midrib; bracken is a broad triangle; a tree fern is a crown of fronds on a trunk. Maidenhair's botanical name, Adiantum, means unwetted, because water beads on the leaflets and runs straight off, and a drawing of it should look that light.

Common questions