Black and grey botanical tattoo of falling maple and oak leaves in shaded linework across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Falling autumn leaves on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of falling autumn leaves, including maple and oak shapes, is tattooed down the arm, with several leaves scattered at different angles. The leaves are outlined in fine black linework and filled with grey shading that gives them some depth and veining. The photograph is taken close up against a teal surface and a row of books, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Leaf Maple leaf Autumn leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up and mind the fire, the lot of you. I'll tell you how the leaves came into the Hollin Cross the winter the snow shut the moor road for eleven weeks, because you've all been staring at the door like it owes you money.

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It was the second week of January when the back door banged open and a wind came through the kitchen smelling of bonfires. Ada Pennock was kneading bread and didn't look up until the leaves started skittering across the flagstones, maple and oak, rust and brown, a few still pale yellow at the edges. They caught on the drovers' boots and the hem of her apron. She swept them into the grate and they hissed like wet kindling, and the whole room went quiet, because nobody in Hollin had seen a tree in leaf since October.

The man who'd come up that morning, a surveyor called Tobias Vane with a brass theodolite strapped to his back, stood in the doorway with snow on his shoulders and said he knew where they'd come from. Forty miles south, the Ashworth beeches had dropped their last in the November gales, and the wind had kept them turning over the tops ever since, waiting for a door left open. He spent three nights at the inn drawing them. Every leaf he could catch he pinned to a sheet, marked with its angle and how far it had fallen, until the table was covered in the same scatter of falling shapes that had come through the kitchen.

The road opened in March. Vane left before breakfast with his instrument and his drawings, and Ada swept the kitchen one last time. Under the sill of the back door she found a single oak leaf, pressed flat and dry, its edges still holding a little gold. She pressed it between the pages of the ledger, under the entry for the winter's coal, and it was still there when the inn changed hands.