Black fine line leaf tattoos trail up the inner forearm from the wrist, with the hand raised above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Falling leaves trail on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of small black leaves, drawn with fine outline and light stippled shading, runs diagonally up the inner forearm from near the wrist. The leaves vary in size and angle, creating a sense of movement along the arm. The arm is photographed against a plain white background with the hand raised, so the tattoo is the main focus.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Leaf Leaves Botanical Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last leaf came aboard tangled in the coil of rope off Madeira, a sycamore key still stuck to its stalk, and you pinched it off before the bosun could see. Nobody carried leaves on a ship. Leaves were for men with a river behind them and a wife to write to. You had only the sea, the same grey lift and drop of it for forty-one days, and a tin of pressed ferns your mother had sent in the spring, spotted now with damp.

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The leaves kept coming. A birch twig caught in the rigging, a fleck of oak in the bread bag, and by the Equator you had a little row of them drying on the lid of the tin under your bunk, each one a shade darker than the last. Old Harrow the carpenter swore they were blown from the Azores, seeds riding the wind like pilgrims, and you let him believe it because it was kinder than admitting you had started to miss the smell of soil.

On the thirty-eighth night the wind went round and the fore deck filled with them, a sudden spill of brown and red across the wet planks. You knelt in the spray gathering them up, and when your fingers were full you laid them out along your arm, one after another, the way a child sets stones along a garden path. They stuck there in the salt. Harrow laughed until he coughed, then took the pencil from behind his ear and drew the first leaf for you on the back of his own hand, very slowly, as if it might blow away.

Land showed on the seventh morning, a smudge of green so dark it looked like ink on the horizon. The tender came out for the post, and you stood at the rail with the wind at your back. When the harbour opened up ahead, bright and sudden, you lifted the last leaf from your sleeve and let the breeze take it, and you watched it go back the way it had come.