Colour tattoo of a maple leaf filled with a forest scene and deer silhouettes, in a botanical style, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf with forest scene on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large maple leaf fills the frame, with a forest scene shaded inside it, including tree silhouettes and a deer on the left. The linework is fine and the leaf veins are picked out in lighter strokes, while the interior uses soft shading. The palette is dominated by ochre, orange and brown, giving an autumnal feel against the skin.

Botanical Upper arm Maple leaf Forest Deer Tree Silhouette Autumn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, it only warms one side of the room. Harrow Falls, autumn of fifty-three, and the sugar bush was burning so bright you could see it from the church steps. My brother Walt came home from the lumber camp with nothing in his pockets but a deer's hoof on a string.

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Walt had a habit of picking up leaves. Every one from the mill road went into his cap, and he'd hold each to the lamp like a doctor reading an X-ray. Then one evening he came in with a maple leaf as wide as his palm, and in its veins, if you tipped it just so, was a whole wood: black trunks, a stag's head above the ridge, and on the left lobe a doe stepping out of the trees toward the pond. He hadn't painted it. The frost had, or the sap, or nobody could say. He swore she came down to drink every night and stood there watching the road.

We laughed, naturally, until the Pruett boy went missing from the sawmill and the leaf went quiet in Walt's cap for three days. On the fourth morning Walt walked out to the pond and found the doe standing in the shallows, her reflection holding still beside her. He didn't show anyone the leaf. He set it on the water and let the current take it toward the falls, and the deer lifted her head and followed it as far as the reeds.

The Pruett boy walked out of the bush two days later, cold and cross and carrying a bundle of kindling he swore he'd never gathered. Walt still has the cap. He says the deer knew the way home, and he has never once gone looking for the leaf.