Colour tattoo of falling autumn leaves and swirling script reading I am a leaf on the wind watch how I soar, on the outer thigh, with a green vine tattoo above it.

Autumn leaves and script quote on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows red and orange maple-style leaves with shaded veins, scattered around a black script quote that reads I am a leaf on the wind watch how I soar. Fine black swirls and dotted trails run through the lettering, and a green and black vine tattoo sits at the top edge of the frame. The photograph is taken straight on under indoor light against a dark background, with the lettering running diagonally across the skin.

Lettering Botanical Thigh Leaf Maple leaves Autumn Script text Quote Swirl Vine Wind

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has sealed the Harrow Gap road since Tuesday, and the landlady of the Black Fell Inn has stopped pretending a coach is coming. You sit by the range with cooling tea and your sister's letter folded in your coat pocket, the one saying she is leaving the farm for Edinburgh and expects you to mind their father. Outside, the window is a grey sheet. Inside, the only colour is the leaves someone pressed between the pages of the guest register, rust and ochre, brittle as biscuit.

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Mrs Pryce, the landlady, tells you about the maple at the back gate that her husband planted the year they married. Every October it turned the colour of a fox and dropped its whole crown in a single week. 'Wind takes what it likes,' she says, tapping the register. The leaf there came from that tree, and a guest once wrote beside it in pencil: I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar. The handwriting is hurried and slanted, as if the writer was already halfway out of the door.

In the morning the snow has stopped and the gate is buried to its top bar. The maple stands bare against a white sky. Then a gust shakes the drifts off the branches, and a single leaf, still red somehow, comes spinning out of the glare and sticks to your sleeve. You think of your sister always running for trains, never waiting for them. You stand there until your fingers ache.

You go back in, take out the letter, and press the leaf between the pages. Then you write one line underneath her name and leave it on the hall table for the postman, so it can travel the rest of the way on its own.