Colour tattoo of a maple leaf shading from red and orange to green, with a fine black stem, on plain skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Autumn maple leaf tattoo

Botanical · Colour · Photo

A maple leaf with clearly drawn veins and a thin black stem fills the centre of the frame. The shading moves from red and orange across the upper half to green at the lower right, with soft gradients and fine dark outlines. The leaf sits on plain, pinkish skin with no other elements visible.

Botanical Realism Maple leaf Leaf Autumn Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gerda had the night shift at the parks depot, which meant the autumn leaves reached her after the lorries had tipped them in the yard. By eleven the sodium lamps buzzed over a heap taller than the fence, and she walked it with a rake and a torch, pulling out the ones that were still fully green. Green ones went to the compost bays. The ones turning she kept.

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Her father had taught her the difference when she was small, holding a sycamore leaf up to the kitchen window. Red came first at the edges, he said, then the sun drained out of the middle and left the veins standing like wire. Maples were stubborn. They let go of the green last, so you could find a single leaf with one side still summer and the other already gone to fire.

One Tuesday in October she found a sugar maple cut from a street tree on Ecclesall Road, its lobes red at the top and green along the lower point, the stalk as thin and black as a pen line. She pressed it between two sheets of newspaper under the office stapler, then slid it into the drawer marked nothing. Nobody asked what the drawer was for.

In March, when the clocks changed and the yard was empty, she opened the drawer. The leaf had dried flat and brown, but along one edge a strip of green had held, faint as a watermark. She carried it to the windowsill and left it in the first thin sun until the light moved off it.