Colour realism tattoo of falling autumn leaves in orange, red and brown across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Falling autumn leaves across a back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

Several autumn leaves, including maple and japanese maple shapes, drift diagonally from the top of the shoulder blade down towards the centre of the back. The leaves are shaded with fine gradients and visible veining, in orange, red, rust and brown tones. The skin is shown from behind with a plain light background, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Back Leaves Autumn leaves Maple leaf

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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 snow shut the pass on Tuesday, and by Thursday the inn at Sallow Cross had stopped pretending the coaches would come. Ida Marr set another place at the long table anyway, out of habit, and you took the chair nearest the range because it was the only warm one left. Nobody asked your business. The stove ticked, the wind worried at the shutters, and you opened the tin your grandmother left you, the one that smells of pennies and cedar.

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Inside, pressed flat between sheets of brown paper, were leaves. Maple first, their five points gone the colour of marmalade. Then the thin, fingered ones from the little tree by the orchard wall, rust at the edges and wine-dark at the stem. Each had a date written beneath in pencil, in a hand you knew as your own from years ago, when you had promised to keep count of the autumns.

Ida came in with two mugs and found you staring into the tin. She did not ask. She sat, turned over a leaf with one finger, and said the surveyor had come up from the valley that morning with a rolled plan under his arm, measuring the orchard for a road that would be wanted in spring. The little tree was marked for felling.

You looked at the window, where the snow had banked halfway up the glass, and then at the scatter of leaves in the tin. You chose the reddest one, the one dated the last week you were home, and carried it out through the scullery door into the blue dusk. The wind took it before you had decided where to put it, lifted it over the drifts and turned it over and over, bright as a coal, until it caught on the orchard wall and stayed there.