Small colour tattoo of a red and orange maple leaf with a thin stem on the back of a hand, in a botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf tattoo on the hand

Botanical · Hand · Colour · Photo

A small maple leaf with a thin curved stem sits on the back of a hand, with the leaf shaded in red, orange and deep red tones. The fine outline and soft gradient shading give it a naturally detailed, botanical look. Another hand rests over the wrist and fingers, and a person in ripped denim shorts is seated in the background.

Botanical Realism Hand Maple leaf Leaf Stem

Find an artist for this

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

The big top came down in the second week of October, one guy rope at a time, while the wind off the Malvern Hills pushed dead leaves across the sawdust as if it had somewhere better to be. Dad said a show that couldn't fill the seats in autumn had no business calling itself a circus. He said a lot of things by then. The takings sat in a ledger on the caravan table, and every page had more pencil crossed out than figures.

Keep reading

Nell had the wire, and she had the only maple leaf in the company. It arrived in a crate of Canadian props, pressed flat between two sheets of tissue, red at the tips and gold near the stem. She kept it inside her mother's old seed catalogue, the one with the cracked spine, and every evening before the band struck up she tapped the cover twice, as if it were a lucky rail. Nobody in the show had been to Canada. Nell said the leaf had been to Canada, and that was close enough.

On the last night we sat on the tailgate of the lorry eating chips out of newspaper. She asked me what would happen to the horses, and to Mr Vale's old grey, who had carried the flag since before I was born. I didn't have an answer and she didn't want one. She opened the catalogue and took out the leaf, and it broke along one vein with a sound like a dry twig.

She looked at the broken half for a long time, then pressed the other half into my palm and folded my fingers over it. 'Keep the stem,' she said. 'The stem's the bit that holds on.' In the morning the lorry rolled out for the coast and the field was left to the crows. I carried that stem in my wallet for years, long after I'd forgotten which of us had been brave enough to say goodbye first.