Fine line black and grey ginkgo leaf tattoo on the upper back, near the shoulder, with dark hair falling beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ginkgo leaves on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of ginkgo leaves on a thin stem sits on the upper back, with one larger leaf fanned out above a smaller leaf. The linework is fine and delicate, with light grey shading inside the leaf fans and a faint purple tint in places. The subject is shot from behind and slightly to the side, with the tattoo placed in the centre-right of the frame against a plain skin background.

Fine line Botanical Back Leaf Leaves Stem Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Ansel had counted the leaves twice before the bell for matins, and both times the number came out wrong. The old ginkgo stood in the lower cloister garden, older than the wall and older than the order that planted it, and every autumn it let go of its fan-shaped leaves all at once, as if someone had called them down. This year they hung on, yellow at the edges, and the abbot said the tree was waiting for someone to ask it a question.

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Ansel took the question to the tree himself. He sat beneath the branches through the night with a lamp and a bowl of rice gruel gone cold, and near dawn a single leaf slid loose and settled on his palm, its stalk pointing down the river road. He had been a stonemason's son before he took vows, and he knew how to follow a grain. So he walked the road for three days, past mills and frozen paddies, until he reached a village where a girl named Oyo had been writing to the monastery for a year.

Her letters were addressed to a brother she had never met. Each one was in her grandmother's careful hand, and each had been folded around a dried leaf. The grandmother had died in spring, but she had dictated the first letter from her bed, and the girl had kept writing, certain the replies were going astray. Ansel read the last letter aloud beside the well. Oyo laughed, then cried, then fetched a basket of pressed leaves, and said the tree had only been trying to send them both down the hill.

They walked back together. By the time they reached the cloister, the ginkgo had dropped every leaf in the night, and the ground was a gold fan of them. Only two remained on the lowest branch, one large and one small on a single thin stem, and they stayed there through the snow, as if the tree had kept something back for someone still on the road.