Close-up of two traditional-style tattoos of pencils with green and yellow leaves and red shading, on skin beside other colour and black-and-grey tattoos.

Pencils sprouting leaves in traditional style

Traditional · Colour · Photo

Two pencils sprout clusters of leaves, each set against a red halo and fine radiating dark lines. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat yellow pencil bodies and olive-green leaves shaded in gradients. Other colour tattoos, including an orange and green floral design and a yellow scroll, sit at the left edge, with black-and-grey shading at the right.

Traditional Pencil Leaf Leaves Sprig Bud Flower Scroll

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

Every spring the schoolmaster's pencils came up through the frost at the edge of Hobb's Wood, two rows of them, yellow as buttercups and just as stubborn. Nobody in Alder Cross planted them. The children said the forest did it, the way it did with mushrooms and lost gloves.

Keep reading

Mrs Tolland, who kept the shop by the well, said the trouble began when old Peter Ransome sharpened his last pencil down to the stub and buried the shavings under the hedge. Something had been waiting for ink, she said, and a pencil leaves a fair bit of itself behind.

When the leaves came, they were not like any leaves in the parish. They spread like dock in the morning, olive at the tips and shadowed darker where the veins ran. Red bloomed round each one at dusk, so the village could see them from the ridge, and the men who went up with rakes to clear them came down without speaking, their hands full of bramble and nothing else.

In the end it was Peter's granddaughter, Ada, who went up with a knife and a jar of water. She did not cut the stems. She sat with the pencils until dark and wrote her name on the nearest bark with the last stub of her own, and in the morning the leaves had folded shut like a letter. The village had its wood back, and every April, if you walk to the edge of Hobb's Wood, two bright pencils stand up through the frost, waiting for someone to tell them what to say.