Woman seen from behind with five small brown maple leaf tattoos scattered across her upper back near the shoulder blade, in a botanical style.

Falling maple leaves across a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

Five small maple leaves are tattooed on the upper back, scattered diagonally as if drifting down from the shoulder towards the spine. Each leaf is drawn with simple outlines and light shading in a warm, muted brown-rust ink. The subject is photographed from behind against a dark room, with her hair in a loose bun and her face turned away from the camera.

Botanical Back Maple leaf Leaves Autumn Back Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Each autumn the wind came over the Harrow Pass carrying the last of the maples down into the valley, and each autumn the people of Settle Hollow counted the leaves that reached the village. Five was a good number. Five meant the pass had kept its promise to the shepherd families who grazed their flocks above the snowline, since before the church had a bell.

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Tomas Vell, a carter's son with mud to his knees, decided he would climb up and ask the pass why it kept taking. He walked for three days with a loaf, a flask of plum spirit and a square of linen in his coat. At the summit a single old maple grew out of a crack in the rock, bare except for a few stubborn leaves. He sat beneath it and waited, as his grandmother had told him to do, without speaking.

Toward evening a leaf came loose and fell, turning over and over, and then another joined it, and another, until five of them went drifting off the edge of the ridge in a loose line, each one sliding slowly toward the valley. Tomas understood then that the pass was not taking anything. It was letting go, carefully, the way his mother let go of spun wool, one thread at a time, so nothing tangled.

He went down before dark with the linen folded around the five leaves he had managed to catch, and he pressed them between the pages of the parish register where the names of the dead were kept. Every autumn after, he climbed back up to sit with the old tree, and the valley people said Tomas Vell never again counted the leaves. He only watched them fall.