Colour realism tattoo of orange, red and yellow autumn maple leaves across the shoulder and upper arm, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Autumn maple leaves on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A realistic tattoo of autumn maple leaves and branches in orange, yellow and red, with some darker leaf silhouettes. The leaves have fine vein detail and soft shading, set against a blurred background of warm reds and dark shadows. The image shows three views of the same arm piece, from front, side and back.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Maple leaves Autumn leaves Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The maple came down on the Tuesday after the first frost, and Mrs Okonedo asked me to keep one branch for her, the one that still had colour in it. I told her maples don't like being moved, that a cutting would wilt before the bus reached Bramhall. She said she didn't want a cutting. She wanted the leaves.

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So I climbed the old tree with a handsaw and a bag of pillowcases, and the light coming through was the colour of marmalade. Leaves came away in my fists like loose change. Some had gone so thin you could read the newsprint through them, their veins standing out like the cords on my father's hands. A few were still bright at the edges and black in the middle where the rain had got in, and I kept those too, because she had said everything.

She met me at the gate in a dressing gown. We pressed them between the pages of the telephone directory, a whole county's worth of surnames going brown under the weight of her maple. She didn't speak while we worked. When the book was shut she laid her palm flat on the cover and said her husband had proposed under that tree in 1961, on a bench that had rotted before the council got round to it.

I left her the saw and took the bus home with a handful of pressed leaves in my coat pocket. By the time I got off, the sky over the ring road had gone the same burnt orange, as if somebody had lit it for her.