Small colour tattoo of a maple leaf with a black outline and stem, shaded in orange and red, on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf on the inner wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small maple leaf with a bold black outline and stem sits on the inner wrist, with the leaf veins drawn in darker red. The leaf is shaded from yellow at the edges to deep orange and red in the centre, giving a warm autumnal look. The tattoo is centred on a plain background of skin, with a blurred room and wooden surface behind.

Botanical Forearm Maple leaf Leaf Stem Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the rope steady, Tom, and keep your hands off the sluice, because the last lad who touched it is still telling the tale in Abingdon. Now. That autumn the cut ran slow and brown, and every leaf on the towpath wanted a ride to the sea. Old Mrs Pargeter came aboard at Lechlade with a basket of windfall apples and a face like a shut door. She had one maple leaf pressed flat in her Bible, which her husband brought home from a country she never once saw.

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The leaf went everywhere with her after that. It rode on the stove rail while we fried eggs, and it sat on the tiller while she read the weather off the swallows. Once it nearly went overboard at Iffley, when the wash from a hire boat came rolling under us like a dog shaking itself dry. I caught it between two fingers. Red at the heart, yellow at the edges, the veins gone dark where the sun had worked on them. She took it off me without a word and tucked it in her cuff.

The turn came at Sandford. The lock was full, the water sulking, and the apples had gone missing somewhere between Wolvercote and there. Mrs Pargeter stood on the lock side with her hand out, and what she wanted wasn't fruit. She wanted to know what the leaf had been doing all those miles. I said, Missus, it's been doing what you've been doing, holding on until somebody lets go. She laughed so hard she dropped it into the lock.

We fished it out together, cold and sodden, and she pinned it to the tiller, where it stayed until the first frost. Now then, pass me that kettle, and mind your feet on the step.