Black and grey leaf tattoo with stippled shading and fine vein linework on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaf tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single leaf, viewed from the front with its stem pointing up, is tattooed on the inner forearm of a person with light skin. The veins are drawn in dark linework, and the leaf body is filled with dense dots and speckles that give it a textured, shaded look. The image is in black ink on a plain background of skin and a dark surface, with the leaf centred in the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Leaf Vein Stem

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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

Mrs Pell had been stippling the same aspen leaf for three weeks when the boy from the post office came up the lane with the telegram. She did not open it straight away. The plate lay on her drawing board under the lamp, a copper sheet the size of a playing card, and she had pricked it with a steel point a thousand times, each dot a small grey weight of ink waiting to be wiped clean. Her husband always said she worked too fine for the Society's money.

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Her brother Tobias had sent the leaf from the reservoir road in a tin, pressed flat between two sheets of blotting paper, with a note that said only, Look at the veins, Hetty. They are the map. She had looked at the veins for days. Each one ran out from the stalk like a river finding its fall, branching where the paper had torn at the edge, and the strange thing was that the leaf was heart-shaped and lopsided, as if it had been trying to say something and lost its nerve halfway.

She opened the telegram at last. It was from the surveyors' office in Ely, about the road that would take the reservoir and the woods alike. Three lines of it were enough. She picked up the finest point she owned, turned the lamp higher, and began again on the left-hand lobe, leaving the veins bare, the way Tobias had asked, so that whoever held the finished print would see the bones of the thing before they saw the dark.