Fine line black ink tattoo of two ginkgo leaves on a stem, placed on the upper back of a person with dark hair and a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ginkgo leaves on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of two ginkgo leaves joined by a thin stem sits centrally on the upper back. The linework is delicate and mostly uniform, with veins drawn inside the fan-shaped leaves and light grey shading. The photograph is taken from behind, with the tattoo as the main focus against the pale skin and dark clothing.

Fine line Botanical Back Leaf Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August, the windfalls already browning in the grass under the Bramley rows, and Maud Ellery stood beneath the ginkgo at the bottom of the orchard with a tape measure she had no intention of using. Her brother had sent a letter in July. The tree had to come out for the new drainage, he said, and the stone wall would need resetting around its roots. She had read the letter three times on the bus and still had not folded it properly.

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The ginkgo was older than the cider press. Their grandfather had planted it from a seedling carried home in a biscuit tin from a nursery in Kent, and he had told everyone it was a fossil that had simply forgotten to die out. Maud believed him until she was twelve, then checked, and found he was only half wrong. The leaves were fan-shaped and split down the middle, like something folded by a careful hand, and in October they turned a clear butter yellow all in the same week, so the lane below filled with gold overnight.

She pulled a leaf from the low branch and turned its stalk between her fingers. Two leaves on one stem, always two, Grandfather used to say, one for each of them, though he never said which was which. Her brother had been up the ladder that morning with a saw he had not yet used. Maud climbed the wall, sat on the coping, and waited for him to come down the track.

When Tom arrived he saw her there with the leaf in her hand and did not mention the letter. He asked whether she remembered the winter the lane flooded and the tree had stood in the water up to its knees. She did. Neither of them said anything else for a while. Then he carried the saw back to the shed, the drainage plan went into a drawer, and the ginkgo kept its two leaves on the one stem, the way it always had.