Realistic colour tattoo of a red and orange maple leaf with black shading on a person's shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red maple leaf on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A detailed maple leaf sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, shown in red, orange and yellow tones. The veins, lobes and stem are rendered with shading and highlights that give the leaf a raised, three-dimensional look, with dark shadowing along its lower edges. The photograph is taken from behind and above, with the subject's hair and a blurred background at the edges of the frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Back Maple leaf Leaf Autumn Vein Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's worn to a dip where old Tobias used to sit with his pipe, and don't let the wind take your hat, because up here it will. Now. You want the leaf story, the one the Pellow boys tell wrong in the Ship. Sit where I can see your face.

Keep reading

A gale came up the Channel the October the Mary Ann went down off the Lizard, and the sea that night threw things at the gallery glass no honest sea should carry. Keeper Hollis had the lamp trimmed and the log open. What he found on the sill at dawn, pressed flat against the brass and dripping salt, was a maple leaf. Red as a poker, its veins standing up like the ribs of a boat, its stalk still green. Nobody on this coast had ever grown such a tree. Hollis wrote it in the log under the date: 'Leaf. Not ours.'

His daughter Nell, nine years old and full of opinions, said it had come from Canada, where the trees turn the colour of struck matches every autumn and the people press the leaves in books. She was half right, as children mostly are. The wind that had hauled the Mary Ann onto the rocks had come off a different ocean first, carrying one leaf three thousand miles to tap at a lighthouse window, as if asking for a lamp to be kept lit a little longer.

Hollis kept it between two pages of the tide tables. Every October after, when the first gale found the headland, Nell climbed to the gallery and searched the water for red. She never found another. But on the night she left for Plymouth to be married, the glass was clear and the lamp was burning, and when she looked back there was one leaf, bright as a lit match, caught on the railing where the wind had set it down.