Black linework maple leaf with dotwork shading and green and yellow watercolour leaves on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaf with watercolour leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A maple leaf is outlined in black with fine dotwork shading on its left half, while its right side overlaps with two leaves filled in soft green, yellow and brown. Loose black speckles spread out from the colour towards the upper right, and a faint dotted blue arc sits beneath the stem. The tattoo is shown in close view on the inner forearm against a dark background.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Maple leaf Leaves Dot 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

Pull that chair closer, the wind off the river gets into everything this time of year. You want to hear about the Pelletier boy and the maple outside the schoolhouse? Right. Autumn of nineteen fifty-three, the month the mill whistle broke and never got fixed, Alma Pelletier sent her son Dennis up that tree with a jar of ink and a borrowed brush. The teacher had said nobody in Harrow Falls could draw a leaf that didn't look like a boot.

Keep reading

Dennis drew one leaf first, every lobe of it in black, then he pricked the veins in with a darning needle, dot after dot, because his hand shook whenever he tried to run a straight line. Half of the leaf stayed bare and bony. The other half he stippled until it looked like frost on a kitchen window. He had the colour mixed and the brush wet when the wind came off the lake and tore three leaves from the branches, and they went spinning over the fence as if they had somewhere better to be.

Mrs Dufresne found one pinned to her washing line by a clothes peg, still green on one side. Dennis spent the next month walking the lanes with a tin of paint, dabbing colour onto every stray leaf he could find, and he marked the route he walked with a little ring of blue dots on the pavement so he would know where he had already searched. The dots wore away by Christmas. The people who remember him say he never did find the third leaf.

So when you look at a maple like that, don't look for the colour first. Look at the speckles flying off to the right. Those are the bits that got away, and he counted every one of them.