Fern & Foxglove

Alina wanted one foxglove stalk running the length of her spine with ostrich fern fronds unfurling off it. The reference she kept coming back to was a pressed flower herbarium sheet, so flat, precise, a little bit clinical. She specifically did not want it to look windswept or flowy, which I really appreciated because it made every decision after that much easier.

A long straight line down a spine is unforgiving in a way that's honestly hard to overstate. The spine isn't straight, nobody's is, and it isn't flat either. It's a valley between two muscle ridges that changes depth as it goes. Any wobble in a fifteen inch line is instantly obvious because you've got the vertebrae sitting right next to it acting as a straight edge. And you can't do it in one pull, so you're working in segments, and every join between segments is somewhere the line can step. Add in that the client is lying face down, breathing, and getting tattooed directly over bone for four hours.

Stencil placement took nearly an hour on its own, which felt like a long time until you consider the alternative. I marked her spinous processes standing up rather than lying down, because the curve genuinely changes between the two, then had her stand, sit and lie down while I checked the line against a plumb reference in three photos. For the tattoo I worked the stem in roughly two inch segments, always pulling downward, and always starting each new segment slightly inside the end of the previous one rather than butting up against it. Overlapping joins disappear, abutting joins show. The skin got stretched flat for the entire stem, which matters more than it sounds over a four hour sitting. The fern fronds came second, in session two, and that was deliberate: they're forgiving and organic, so having them go on after the stem had healed meant I could place them to quietly correct the two spots where the stem sat a millimetre off centre.