Plastic zone around a fatigue crack in AISI 304 stainless steel was studied experimentally using nanoindentation and numerically by the finite element analysis. Results obtained from one experimental observation of crack propagating under constant amplitude loading showed that nanohardness can be correlated to strain hardening caused by the cyclic deformation in the vicinity of the crack. However, for the material chosen for this study, exact plastic zone shape is hard to evaluate due to the scattering of experimental results.