Coloured drawing of a green man face formed from leaves in green and blue tones, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green man face made of leaves

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A drawn green man figure, with a face modelled in pale skin tones and framed entirely by layered leaves that sprout from the head and fall down below the chin. The leaves are outlined in dark ink with soft green and yellow shading, and faint blue wash appears behind the figure and within a circular outline. The composition is centred on a single vertical sheet with the figure filling most of the frame.

Botanical Leaves Face Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder wobbled on the wet grass at Cheddon Fitzpaine, and Aunt Ivy told me to hold it steady or go home. I held it. Above me, on the centre pillar of the Gallopers, the green man looked down through his own leaves as if he had heard us both and found us tiresome.

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Every October the fair packed up and every spring it set up again, and every time Ivy went over the carved face with a sable brush and a pot of old green paint. She said he liked his leaves fresh or he sulked, and the horses went lame. I thought she was teasing, until the year I was twelve and she let me do the chin. The paint was cold. Under it the wood felt warm, like something sleeping.

The fair left the field in November and went south in a convoy of lorries. The next March we came back to the same gate and found the hedge along the lane had come into leaf a full month early, every twig furred with buds the shape of his brows. Ivy stood with her hands deep in her coat and said nothing for a long while.

That summer the carousel ran without a single breakdown. When I took the ladder down that evening there was one new leaf stuck to the wet varnish of the pillar, pale green, its edges still soft, and no paint on my brush to account for it. I put it in my pocket. I still have it, pressed in the family Bible between the names of everyone who ever held the ladder.