Two small red maple leaves in soft botanical shading on the outer ankle, one leaf slightly smaller and angled towards the heel.

Two maple leaves on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a close view of a person's ankle and heel with two maple leaves tattooed on the outer side. The leaves have fine outline work and soft, blended shading in red, maroon and pink, with short stems and light tonal variation across each leaf. The subject sits centrally on a dark textured background, and the tattoo is the clear focus of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley on the Ardrossan Lass smells of burnt onions by six, and you have been scrubbing the steel rail above the range since the middle watch. Cook Dunmore hands you a tea towel and says the Atlantic won't care what month it is, but your mother's kitchen in Nova Scotia always did. You still keep the first leaf you ever found, pressed flat inside the flour ledger, gone the colour of weak claret.

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Out past the Azores the sea turns the grey of cold porridge, and the second engineer asks what the leaves are for. You tell him they are for October. Every autumn the sugar maples on the hill behind the farm caught fire all at once, one tree after another, and you and your brother would race down the lane with your pockets full, stems snapping, to see who could carry the most before the wind took them.

On the morning the ship docks in Halifax, you walk off the gangway with a single leaf in your palm, its stem still green. The customs man asks nothing. The hill is bare now and the farm has a new owner, but the old maple has a fresh ring of red leaves at its foot where someone has raked them into a heap. You crouch on the verge and set your leaf on the soil beside the others, and in the low light it looks exactly like the ones that fell before it.

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