Colourful botanical maple leaf tattoo in red, orange and green on the inner forearm, with soft shading along the veins.

Autumn maple leaf on an arm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single maple leaf with a short stem fills the centre of the frame, drawn with fine outlines and soft internal vein lines. The shading is gradual, moving from yellow and green near the top to deep orange and red along the edges. The plain pale skin and blurred background keep the focus on the tattoo.

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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

Sit down, love, the kettle's on and the lift has been sulking since midnight, so you'll get your breath back here. Bed nine on Ward Four, that's where I want to start. The woman who came in off the Sheffield train with one carrier bag and a cough like a rusty gate. Her name was Inés Varga, she said, and tucked in her coat pocket was a leaf wrapped in a paper napkin, gone the colour of a fox.

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It was a maple leaf, and I'd seen plenty of those, but not like that one. Her father had planted a tree outside their house in Ontario the summer before they left for good, and every October he'd bring one leaf in to the kitchen table and turn it over in the lamplight. Green at the stalk, he used to say, the way the year starts. Gold in the middle, where the summer is still arguing. Red at the teeth of the edge, where it has made up its mind.

She couldn't sleep that last night, so I held the napkin up to the corridor window while the streetlamps buzzed outside. You could see all three colours at once. She laughed, which set her coughing, and then she said it was not dying, it was only changing its mind about what colour to be.

They discharged her at seven. I found the napkin in the drawer of the night desk, folded flat, and I put it in the back of my shift diary, where it still is. Some mornings I open it just to check the red has held.

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