Fine line black ink drawing of a ginkgo leaf with radiating veins on a long stem, suitable as a botanical flash design.

Ginkgo leaf line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single ginkgo leaf with a fan-shaped blade and a long thin stem is drawn on white paper. The linework is fine and dark, with many parallel veins radiating from the base to the lobed outer edge. The image is entirely black ink on white, with no shading or colour, and the leaf sits centred with open space around it.

Fine line Botanical Leaf Stem Vein

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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

Hannah Greaves counted the ribs twice before she would admit the mistake was hers. Forty-one of them radiated from the pivot, pear wood pared so thin the gas lamp glowed through, and at the outer edge one rib had come off the press with a notch cut where no notch belonged. Her father would have spotted it from the doorway. He had spotted everything from the doorway, right up until March, and now the workshop above the bakery on Exmouth Market was hers to answer for.

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The commission had come from a man named Lusk, who worked at the Chelsea Physic Garden and wanted a fan for his sister's wedding dance, with a leaf painted on it exactly as the ginkgo in Bloomsbury Square had dropped it. He brought one in a folded sheet of blotting paper. He held it up to the window and turned it slowly. "The veins never join," he said. "Every other leaf I know makes a net. This one just forks and forks and runs out to the edge, like a river that never meets the sea."

Hannah sat with the leaf and a pin for most of an afternoon. The drawing her father had made, which she had been copying, was tidy and wrong. She took the notched rib and, rather than file it smooth, split it with a fine saw and let the two halves fan apart. The fan gained a second spine at its edge, and the lobes lifted into the shape she had been failing to draw for a month.

When Lusk collected it he opened it once in the shop, and the light came through the veins in dark threads. He folded it again without a word and paid in coins warm from his pocket. Hannah kept the offcut in the drawer by the till, a sliver of pear wood with a fork at one end, and when the tree in the square dropped its leaves that autumn she went out and gathered one, the way her father had taught her, to see how it was done.