Watercolour-style tattoo of a red and green leaf with visible veins on the shoulder blade, with soft paint-like splashes trailing to the left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour leaf on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A single leaf with a red top edge fading to green at the base is shown, with its veins picked out in pale lines. Soft washes of red, green and grey extend beyond the leaf outline, with small dark specks around the edges. The leaf sits centrally on the upper back and shoulder area, against plain skin.

Botanical Shoulder Leaf Vein Watercolour wash Splatter

Find an artist for this

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

Grandad's paint box had cracked cakes of colour in it, and the crimson had dried to a crust, so I wet it with a drop from the kettle and waited for it to soften before I touched the brush to the paper. He had pinned a real leaf to the board in October, a beech leaf off the hedge at Thornbury Lane, and told me red always starts at the edge because that is where the light reaches a leaf first. Green, he said, was what the stem kept back for itself. I was supposed to paint it sitting still, but I kept looking at the window.

Keep reading

The jar of grey wash went over on the landing carpet in the second week, and he didn't scold me. He just laughed and said nothing in a living thing stops exactly where you draw the line, so the water might as well be allowed out too. The little dark specks were his idea. He flicked the brush at the paper with two fingers, the way he flicked crumbs at the sparrows, and said the leaf had been out in all weather and deserved some of it on its coat.

I finished the piece after the funeral, following his order exactly: red first, then the green pulled up from below, then the grey left to bleed past the outline. I picked out the veins last with a dry brush and a held breath, leaving them as bare paper. When I lifted the board to the light, the leaf looked as if it had just come down and was still settling. The next morning one really did drop past the window, red at the top and green at the stalk, and I stood there holding the board against the glass, unable to say which of the two was his.