Woman seen from behind with black and grey leaf tattoos covering both arms, a waterfall behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy sleeve tattoos on a woman by a waterfall

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a bun stands with her back to the camera, wearing a black strappy top and plaid trousers. Both arms are covered with tattoos of leaves and foliage, shaded in black and grey with dark, textured detail. A misty waterfall and dense green plants fill the background.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Shoulder Leaves Foliage Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hal had been cutting blackthorn along the bottom field since first light, and by eleven his gloves were stiff with sap and frost. Below him the beck ran brown under a skin of mist, and its noise came up through the hedge like someone talking in another room. His mother had kept the orchard ledger, every tree numbered in pencil, and he had inherited it along with the debts.

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The margins of that ledger were full of leaves. Forty years of her drawing them while she waited on the kettle or the vet: sycamore, hawthorn, the split palm of a horse chestnut, all in soft grey lead, shaded so carefully that some looked wet. Nobody had told him she could draw. He turned to tree nine, the old Bramley the wind had taken in March, and found a single line written underneath: keep one green.

He walked down to the weir with the book buttoned inside his coat. The mist lifted off the water in slow ropes, and the ivy on the sluice gate was still glossy, the only green for half a mile. He tore off a sprig, pressed it between the pages against tree nine, and sat on the cold stone until his fingers stopped aching.

That evening he rang the nursery about grafting stock for spring. When the woman asked which variety he wanted, he read her the name from the margin, the one his mother had never planted. There was a long pause on the line, then the sound of a pen. "Put down two," Hal said, "and don't send them bare."