Colour botanical tattoo of orange and red maple leaves on a branch across the side of a torso, over the ribs.

Autumn maple branch on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of maple leaves in orange, red and yellow hanging from thin brown branches that curve across the side of the torso. The leaves have pale highlighted veins and soft shaded edges, while the branches are drawn in dark brown linework with fine twigs. The design runs diagonally from the upper flank down towards the lower side, against a plain skin background.

Botanical Ribs Maple leaves Autumn leaves Branch Twig Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every October my grandmother's sister Ada would climb the old sycamore behind the chapel, not for the apples but for the one branch that turned first. She said a branch that changed colour before the rest was showing the others the way, and that the whole village followed it down into winter like children following a lamp. The year the bells were to ring for Thomas Pell and the miller's girl, the wind came off the hill two weeks early and stripped the lane bare, and nobody thought the wedding could go ahead under such a sky.

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But Ada had kept a bundle of maple sprigs in the dresser drawer, wrapped in brown paper, and she carried them up the church path herself. Their leaves had gone the colour of a fox's back and the colour of a pear skin and, at the stem, a rust like old pennies. She laid them across the altar rail and said nothing about it. The vicar, who had no patience for country superstition, looked at the leaves a long while and then rang the bell himself.

What people remembered afterwards was not the ceremony but the walk home. The wind dropped, the sun came low through the churchyard yews, and the leaves that had been torn from the lane lifted off the cobbles and drifted after the couple, catching in their hair and on the hems of the bridesmaids' skirts, until the whole procession went up the hill wearing autumn like a shawl.

Ada never said she had arranged it. She only remarked, as she folded the brown paper, that the first branch always knows where it is going.