Black and grey shaded maple leaf tattoo on a wrist, with a silver chain bracelet on the other wrist beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single maple leaf with its stem, shown in black ink with grey shading that suggests the veins and depth of the leaf. The tattoo sits on the wrist against a plain light background, and a silver chain bracelet is visible on the other wrist. The shot is close and centred on the tattoo, with detailed linework and smooth tonal shading.

Botanical Forearm Maple leaf Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the tree would not take. The abbot said so at the gate, when the carter unloaded a bundle of wet sticks wrapped in sacking, with a letter from a cousin in the port who swore they came from a country on the far side of the grey sea. The sticks had no buds. Brother Anselm planted them in the lee of the mill wall anyway, where the frost lay longest, and he watered them from the cistern each dawn before the bell.

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Through the winter nothing happened. The other brothers went to Lauds, came back, and said nothing, which was their way of saying it was foolish. In March a single green tongue pushed from one stick. Anselm wept into his sleeve so no one would see, and then went and told the abbot anyway.

The tree grew slowly, the way things do when nobody asks them to hurry. By the third summer it had a crooked trunk and leaves with five points, dark on top and pale beneath. In autumn they turned the colour of the candles in the cellar chapel. The brothers stopped saying it would not take. A novice asked why the leaves had hands. Anselm said they were for holding on to the wind.

In his last year, old and half blind, he had a boy cut one leaf and press it between the pages of the psalter. When the abbey was emptied and its books sold, the psalter went to a farm across the valley. The leaf came out in the farmer's daughter's hand, dry as paper, and she asked what kind of tree could hold a hand that long.