Colour tattoo of autumn maple leaves in red, orange, green and purple, cascading from the shoulder down the spine on a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Autumn maple leaves cascading down the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of maple and other autumn leaves spreads from the upper back and shoulder blade down along the spine, with a few leaves trailing towards the waist. The leaves are rendered with soft shading, fine veining and gradual colour blends, with dark ink splatters scattered among them. The composition is a flowing diagonal over bare skin, with the design fading into lighter, smaller leaves at the lower end.

Botanical Realism Back Maple leaves Autumn leaves Leaves Branch Ink splatter

Find an artist for this

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

The surveyor came up the valley in October with a chain, a notebook and a grievance against trees. Nobody in Hollow Ferry had ever counted the leaves, and he meant to do it before the frost took them, so the mill company could price the timber by the acre of colour. Maud Penhallow, who kept the ferry and the only kettle in the village, told him he would need a longer chain.

Keep reading

He worked three days. He strung cord between the maples on Cutler's Rise, marked out squares, and bent over his tally with a pencil that kept snapping. Each morning the cord sagged under a fresh weight of red and ochre, and each night the wind took half of what he had counted. On the fourth morning he found Maud sitting on the bank with her boots off, feeding a lean grey dog scraps of toast and watching the water carry leaves past her feet like small boats.

"You're counting the wrong thing," she said. "The tree isn't holding them. It's only letting go." He said figures were figures. She handed him a leaf, veined like a map of rivers and still damp at the stem, and told him to keep it until he could tell her what it weighed. He pocketed it out of politeness and forgot it in his coat.

The company sent a man in spring to finish the survey. The surveyor's notebook turned up in a drawer at Ferry House, its pages full of drawings rather than sums: a branch leaning down the page, leaves thinning towards the bottom edge, and beside them, in careful script, a single word he had never once written in the field. Maud kept the notebook on the shelf above the kettle, and in October she would sometimes open it and count the drawn leaves, which were always more than the true ones.