Small red maple leaf tattoo with a little blue detail on the inner wrist of a hand with red nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small maple leaf on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small maple leaf is tattooed on the inner wrist, filled mainly in red with a thin darker outline and a touch of blue at the base. A hand with red painted nails is raised at the top of the frame, with a dark band of fabric and a blurred background behind it. The tattoo sits centrally and is the clear focus of the photograph.

Forearm Maple leaf Leaf Wrist Hand

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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

Edith had kept the envelope under the post office counter for eleven years because the stamp was wrong. It showed a red leaf with too many points and no monarch's head, and Mr Pryce at the sorting desk had turned it over twice before he let it go. Inside was a maple leaf pressed flat and gone the colour of old brick, and a note in pencil: Dear Edith, this is the tree I told you about. Come in October. Bring the good coat. Ray.

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She had not gone in October. She had gone the March after, to the bus station and the damp flat above the bakery, where the radiator knocked like someone wanting in. Ray wrote every Thursday for a year and then every second Thursday, the way a man does when he is trying not to be the one who stops. His letters smelled of cedar and cold. She kept them in a biscuit tin with the leaf, and the tin went with her from Leeds to Halifax and back again.

Last spring the tin came down from the wardrobe shelf because her knees were bad and the flat was being sold. Under the letters she found a second envelope, never opened, postmarked the week after the first. Inside was a small pencil sketch of a leaf, and beneath it a line in a hand she did not know: Ray's sister says he moved to Ottawa and didn't leave a forwarding address. He said you'd know what to do with the leaf.

Edith held the real one up to the window until the thin dark veins showed like a map she had never bothered to read. Then she filled the kettle, got down two cups, and left the second one on the saucer for a while before she drank from it.