Three views of a man's upper arm and shoulder with a colour botanical tattoo of autumn maple leaves in orange, red and green with dark ink splatters.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Autumn maple leaves sleeve in watercolour style

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with maple leaves on thin branches, drawn with loose, dark linework and scattered ink splatters. The leaves shade from orange and red to green and black, with soft colour washes that give a painterly, watercolour effect. Three photographs show the same arm from the back and both sides, with the head cropped out of frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Maple leaf Leaves Branch Autumn Splatter

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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 surveyors had said the maples would never survive the transfer, and for eleven years Imke had proved them wrong one cutting at a time. Now the lamp schedule on Deck Nine ran its autumn programme, dimming the red spectrum by a fraction each night, and the leaves on the old tree beside the hatch had started to turn the way the archive footage showed: a bruise of orange at the tips, then the veins going dark where the sap pulled back.

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The ship's council wanted the tree stripped before the spring cycle. Its roots had cracked a drain in the water reclamation housing, and the logs showed it drinking more than its share. Imke carried the order in her pocket for three days without taking it out. On the fourth morning she found Ruth from hydroponics standing under the branches with a scraper in one hand, watching a single leaf drift sideways through the grow-light like a thrown paper boat.

"Let it finish," Imke said. Ruth argued about water and about the drain, and Imke agreed with every point, then asked her to wait until the last leaf came down. They waited together. The leaves fell slowly in the recycled air, rust and green and black at their edges, and where one struck the grating it burst into a spray of dark specks, as though someone had flicked a loaded brush across the metal.

When the council came the following week, Imke showed them the fallen leaves and the speckled floor and told them the tree was shedding its load the way trees do. Nobody argued. The scraper stayed on its hook. By spring the splashes had been trodden into a faint red map that no one on Deck Nine was willing to scrub away.