Colour botanical tattoo of autumn leaves in red, orange and purple wrapping around a forearm, shown in five stacked close-up photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Autumn leaves across a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows falling and clustered autumn leaves, with larger oak-like leaves and smaller scattered leaves in red, orange, yellow and purple. The leaves are shaded softly with blended colour and minimal outlines, and they drift diagonally across the skin. Five stacked close-up photographs show the same arm from slightly different angles against a dark background.

Botanical Forearm Autumn leaves Leaves Foliage

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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

You have the tiller under one arm and a mug of tea going cold on the gunwale when the first leaves come down the cut. Rust-red, a few the colour of old pennies, they turn slowly on the brown water as if they have been told where to go and see no reason to hurry. Your father swore the leaves always ran early on the Calder before a hard winter, and he swore it in the same voice he kept for the lock-keepers and the price of coal.

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The Marigold is nine tons of tired oak and a sooty stove, and she has never once gone where the chart said. Past Brindle Lock the towpath bends under a line of trees that have given up on summer, and the wind tears through them so the leaves skate across the bow in flurries, some broad and lobed, some no bigger than a thumbnail. One lodges against the fender. You lean over and lift it out, its pale veins gone brittle, a smear of purple still bleeding at the stalk. You press it into the logbook at the page where your father wrote last year's mileage in his square capitals.

At the lock the gates groan open. A boy on the bank in a borrowed cagoule shouts that you have a leaf on your collar, and you hadn't noticed, so you brush it off and it spins away on the wind. You laugh, which surprises you. He throws his rope badly, and you catch it anyway, one loop around the bollard before the current can argue, the way your father taught you.

By dusk you have tied up at Shale Wharf with the stove lit and the logbook open on the table. The leaves are still coming down past the window, gathering in the wet grass along the cut, and you decide, in the stubborn way he would have approved of, that the winter moorings can wait one more night.