Fine line tattoo of a red outlined apple with a green leaf and black stem on skin, shown beside its line drawing design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline apple with leaf tattoo

Fine line · Colour · Photo

The left panel is a line drawing of an apple with a curled red outline, a green leaf and a black stem. The right panel is a photograph of the same apple tattooed on skin, with a red outline, a teal-green leaf and a dark stem. The linework is thin and mostly single-weight, with a spiral detail at the base and lower right, and the design is centred against a plain background.

Fine line Apple Leaf Stem Outline Spiral

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

Dear Marjorie, the orchard man came up the lane on Tuesday with a cart full of Bramleys and a face like a wet Sunday, so I bought the whole lot off him for the price of a cup of tea. You'll laugh, but I've been peeling them since, and the kitchen smells like October in March. I kept the peel in one long curl, the way your mother taught us, and the curl came away in a spiral that looked so much like the scroll on the harbour sign that I put it on the windowsill to show Alan when he gets in from the boats.

Keep reading

Alan didn't say much. He turned the peel over in his big hands for a while, then asked if I'd thought about what the apple wanted to be. I told him it wanted to be pie, and he said no, it wanted to be drawn, and that the lad from the tattoo parlour on Quay Street had been asking for someone to sketch him something for his mother's birthday. So I sat at the table with the good pencil and drew an apple with a stalk that curled back on itself, and a leaf the green of the sea by the breakwater, and I left a loop at the bottom where the peel had gone round.

The lad took one look and said it looked like it was still deciding whether to fall. I said good, that's the trick of it. He's inking it on Saturday. I've made him promise to send me a photograph, though I suspect I'll have to wait for Alan to find his glasses before I can make out the spiral.

Write soon. Tell me if Pauline's hip is any better, and whether you still have that tin of Bramley jam recipe in your head.

All my love, Eileen