Small red and orange maple leaf tattoo with soft shading and a thin stem, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small maple leaf sits on the inner forearm, with its stem curving down and to the left. The leaf is filled with red at the top and fades to orange and yellow towards the base, with soft, blended shading and no hard outlines. The plain, pale background keeps the focus on the leaf.

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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

Third night out and the wind has swung west, so the galley reeks of wet wool and scorched onions, and Mr Corran wants the second crate of lamp oil before you have your oilskins off. You carry it up the companionway two steps at a time, the crate knocking your shin, and nearly drop it when the ship lifts and drops like a thrown plate.

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The leaf turns up in the lamp locker, where it has no business being. It is flat and brittle, folded inside a Halifax shipping manifest from a voyage nobody on board remembers, its stalk gone the colour of stewed tea. The top points are still red as a pillar box. The lower lobes have faded to a sort of butter yellow, as if someone held a candle under them and thought better of it. Ada the cook sees you holding it and says her uncle brought a bucket of those back from Ontario once, and that they smell of cold smoke and sugar when you crush them, which you do not, because you are not a fool.

Four days later the grey swell goes flat and the first gulls come wheeling out of nowhere, and the Nova Scotia coast is a thin dark line that could be cloud. You stand at the rail with the leaf in your palm. The wind takes it before you decide anything, and it skids off over the water, red side up, going west ahead of you, the only thing on this ship that already knows the way home.

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