Colour tattoo of a maple leaf on the forearm near the elbow, with a realistic autumn forest and deer silhouettes filling the leaf in yellow, brown and red.

Maple leaf with forest scene on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A maple leaf fills most of the frame, with its veins drawn in dark linework and its interior shaded to show a forest of tree silhouettes and a deer on the left. The palette is mainly yellow, ochre, brown and red, with soft shading that gives the scene depth. The tattoo sits on the outer forearm close to the elbow, and the leaf stem runs down towards the wrist.

Botanical Realism Forearm Maple leaf Forest Tree Deer Silhouette Autumn

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, the urn has only just boiled and I'll tell it before Mr Pell starts on the raffle. You'll remember the maple at the bottom of the playing field, the one the council wanted felled the year we all sat our eleven-plus. Nobody ever did it. Old Mr Hale from the allotments kept the men off it with a shotgun and a flask of tea, so it stood there, burning orange every October and dropping its hands across the netball court.

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Our Miss Teague kept a nature table by the radiator, and each autumn she sent us out to bring back one leaf, flat, with no holes. Most of us came back with sycamore and got a gold star for effort. Dennis Parr brought back a maple the size of a dinner plate, and when she held it to the window the light came through and we all saw the wood inside it. Not trees exactly. Dark shapes, like cut paper. A stag stood at the edge of them with its head up, listening to something none of us could hear.

Dennis moved to Kendal the summer after. Forty years on, his sister showed me a photograph on her phone of that same leaf inked in a tattoo parlour in Leeds, copied from the pressed one he'd carried in his wallet until it fell to pieces. The veins ran down to the wrist like a river's branches, and the stag was still there, listening. She said the artist had asked Dennis what the deer was listening for, and he'd told her nothing, it was just waiting for the rest of us to hush.

So here's my ending, and you can argue with it at the bar. The leaf's still pinned to the wall in Miss Teague's old room, if they haven't painted over it. Go and look. Hold it up to the light and tell me the deer's stopped listening.