Colour tattoo of autumn maple leaves, a branch and a teal owl across a shoulder and upper arm, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Autumn maple leaves and owl across the shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with red, orange and green maple leaves on thin brown branches, with winged seed pods among them. A teal owl with large round eyes sits on a branch on the upper arm, outlined in dark lines. Shading is soft and the colours are rich and warm, shown across three close photographs of the same arm.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Maple leaf Maple leaves Branch Owl Autumn leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the fire, because the owl does not like a crowd on the step. Now. The year the maples turned early in the hill country, the grain was still standing in the lower fields, and nobody thought to be afraid of red leaves. Only old Meric the reeve did, because his mother had told him that when the samaras spin down like little green propellers in the still air, the owl in the oak is counting. Every one that lands on the threshold, she said, is a debt come due.

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So Meric went up the slope with a basket and a knife and a cloth bag of barley, and he found the owl where she always sat, on a bare branch that crooked like a finger. Her eyes were round as cart wheels and the colour of the sea in winter. He asked her what the count was for. She turned her head all the way round, the way owls do, and said, 'For the leaves you have not yet swept.'

He understood then. The whole valley had let the leaves lie on the paths, on the roofs, in the wells, and nobody had said a word because nobody wanted to be the one who wasted a morning with a broom. Meric swept his own step, then the lane, then the well-head, and when he came back up the hill with his arms aching, the owl had gone. In her place, on the lowest branch, sat a single maple leaf, red at the tip and gold at the stem, and it did not fall for a whole week.