Back of a person with a botanical tattoo of maple leaves on a branch running from the shoulder blade down the spine, in soft black and grey shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Maple leaves cascading down a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A branch of maple leaves runs from the upper shoulder blade down the spine, with leaves in varying sizes and angles. The tattoo uses soft shading and fine veining in black and grey, with a few lighter greyish tones giving the leaves depth. The bare back fills most of the frame, with the tattoo placed diagonally across it against a blurred pale background.

Botanical Back Shoulder Maple leaves Leaves Branch Spine

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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

You are the only one still awake when the snow reaches the second-floor windowsills, and the inn at Hollin Gate has gone quiet except for the stove ticking in the back parlour. The guests went up hours ago, the carter to the loft room over the stable, the two walkers to the blue room with its sloping ceiling. You count the bolts on the front door for the third time and then stop, because counting is what your mother did when the river rose.

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Out past the kitchen window the old maple stands in its iron ring, bare now, its branches bent under a skin of ice. Your grandfather planted it the spring he bought the place, and every October it turned the colour of a struck match, so that drivers coming up the valley road thought the inn was on fire. This year the leaves came down in a single wet week. You swept them into barrows and carried them to the compost heap, and one or two stayed stuck to the soles of your boots all the way into the scullery.

A knock comes at ten to midnight, soft, the knock of someone who expects to be refused. You open the door a hand's width. A woman stands on the step with snow on her shoulders and a ledger under one arm, the ledger your grandfather kept, its spine mended with brown tape. She says he owed her father a bed for three nights in the winter of the flood, and she has come to collect it. You look at the page where his neat hand has written her father's name and then struck it through.

You do not say there is no room. You take her coat, hang it by the stove, and go up for the blue room's key. In the hall you pass the framed photograph of the maple in full red leaf, and beneath it, pinned to the cork, is one pressed leaf you do not remember putting there. It is curled at the edges and perfectly dry, and when you lift it, the map of its veins is as fine as the lines of a letter nobody sent.