Realistic colour tattoo of falling autumn maple leaves in orange, red, green and gold on the outer lower leg.

Autumn maple leaves down a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cascade of maple leaves in orange, red, gold and green trails down the outer side of a lower leg, ending near the ankle. The leaves are shaded to look three-dimensional, with visible veins, curled edges and soft shadows beneath some of them. The skin shows freckles, and the blurred grey carpet behind gives the photo a plain, domestic setting.

Realism Botanical Calf Maple leaf Autumn leaves Leaves Foliage

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

Ada found the first leaf on the back stairs of the Ferrars house in Harrogate, though nobody in the house owned a maple tree. It was the colour of a fox and curled at the edges like a hand left out in the cold. She carried it down to the kitchen by its stalk, where Mrs Penney was blacking the range, and asked whether it had come in on somebody's boot.

Keep reading

By Friday there were eleven, pressed beneath the lid of the bread crock and laid out on the scrubbed table in order of size. Ada copied each one into the housekeeping book beside the coal deliveries, because she had been taught that anything unaccounted for was as good as stolen. Cook laughed and called it the Canadian post. Mr Ferrars, home from Halifax since June with a cough and a trunk of charts, said nothing at all, and that was the worst of it.

On the last Sunday of October the leaves began to come down the stairs faster, two and three at a time, each one landing a step further along than the last. Ada followed them through the scullery, out past the rhubarb and into the lane, where they lay across the cobbles as though someone had dropped a glove and kept on dropping it. The trail ended at the station gate, where a tall young man in a grey overcoat was lifting a trunk onto a porter's barrow.

He turned, saw her holding the last leaf, and smiled as if she had finally got the sum right. "Tell Father the tree is still standing," he said, and boarded the Leeds train without looking back. Ada put the leaf in her apron pocket and walked home counting every step.