Red maple leaf tattoo with bold black outlines and cut-out lettering-style shapes across the top of a foot, placed near the ankle.

Red maple leaf on the top of a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A red maple leaf with a long stem fills most of the image, drawn with bold black outlines and shaded in several tones of red. Letter-like cut-outs run through the leaf, and the veins and light highlights give it a glossy, dimensional look. A bare foot and toes are shown in soft, even light, with a printed red maple leaf photograph partly visible in the background on the right.

Other Maple leaf Leaf Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Four o'clock and the proving cabinet was already ticking, the dough inside rising as if it had somewhere better to be. I rubbed the cold butter into the flour with my fingertips, the way Nan taught me, and watched the window over the sink turn from black to the colour of weak tea. Out in the yard the bins were still steaming.

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The leaf stencil lived in the drawer under the scales. Nan had cut it from a biscuit tin lid years ago, a maple leaf with the veins slashed through, and every Saturday she pressed it into the cinnamon knots with a dusting of cocoa so customers would know which were hers. She always said the cut-out shapes spelled nothing, that a wedding baker in Leeds had made it as a joke. I never believed her, but I never asked again either.

Mr Abernethy came in at half five, as he always did, wanting his flat white and the heel of yesterday's rye. He stood by the counter turning his cap in his hands. 'Your nan would have liked the new sign,' he said, nodding at the window where I'd painted the name in gold. 'Shame about the spelling.' I looked at the paint, then at him. Then I took the stencil from the drawer, laid it over a fresh tray of knots, and dusted it with cocoa until the leaf showed clean and dark on the pastry.

He bought four and didn't mention the spelling again. By six the shop smelled of burnt sugar and cardamom, and the first grey light came up over the car park, catching the sharp edges of every leaf I'd made that morning.