Colour tattoo of two maple leaves in orange, red and yellow with the words busy, busy, busy in black typewriter lettering above them, on a forearm.

Maple leaves and busy lettering on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a forearm with two maple leaves in shaded orange, red and yellow, one above the other with thin black stems. Above them, the words busy, busy, busy run in black typewriter-style lettering. The leaves are shaded with smooth gradients, and the background shows a chair, a plaid shirt and jeans.

Botanical Lettering Forearm Maple leaf Leaves Autumn Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Oduya had stamped passports at the Pine Hollow crossing for nineteen years, and in all that time the October rush had never once made him hurry. He liked the rhythm of it: the ding of the bell, the cough of the old Olympia typewriter behind the glass, and the three words he tapped onto the back of every slip when the queue grew long. Busy, busy, busy. Nobody ever asked what they meant.

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On the third Tuesday a red pickup pulled up with a maple leaf the size of a dinner plate stuck to its bonnet. The driver, a woman called Ines Halloran, leaned out and said she had a crate of syrup, a spaniel and no patience left. Frank took her papers and noticed the leaf had dried to the colour of a fox. He typed on the slip without looking, and then stopped, because the letters had come out crooked for the first time in years, as though the machine had grown tired of him.

He asked where she was headed. Halloran said her mother's orchard in Stanstead, where she had promised to rake leaves for a week and had not raked a single one in twenty years. Frank found himself telling her about the carriage return that stuck, and she laughed, and the queue behind her grumbled, and he stamped her slip twice by mistake.

When she drove off, the leaf slid from the bonnet and landed face down in the road. Frank went out in his coat and picked it up, then carried it back into the booth and pressed it flat beneath the typewriter's carriage, where it would stay until someone else needed the room to breathe.