Small leaf tattoo on a forearm with fine black vein linework and a soft green and yellow wash, in a botanical fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour leaf on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A single leaf sits on the forearm, drawn with fine black linework for the midrib and veins, with a short stem extending toward the upper right. The leaf is filled with soft green and yellow shading that fades at the edges, with a small touch of blue near the lower edge. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a softly blurred background of indoor plants and a grey floor.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Leaf Vein Stem Branch

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

The net came up heavy at half four off Lowestoft, and Dad was already swearing at the winch before the first herring showed silver in the mesh. I was on the gutting table with my sleeves rolled, flicking fish into the tubs, when Mick pulled a leaf out from under the cod ends and held it up like a wet letter. It was green on one side and yellow where the sun had got at it, a sycamore or near enough, and nobody on a fleet of eleven boats had seen a tree for three weeks.

Keep reading

'Chuck it over,' Dad said. Mick didn't. He turned it to the lamp and pointed at the veins, fine as cracks in a windscreen, all running down to one black stalk. 'Somebody's been drawing on this,' he said, and I laughed, because it looked true. The edges had gone blue where the salt had touched them, a bruise of colour no tree would have chosen. I asked where it had come from. Nobody knew. A river mouth, maybe, or a gull had dropped it, or it had ridden the tide out of some garden none of us would ever see.

I kept it. I pressed it between two pages of the tide tables, and when we came in on Thursday I drove up to my nan's in Halesworth with the fish money in an envelope and the leaf in my coat. She held it to the window the way Mick had held it to the lamp. 'That's a birch,' she said, 'or it wants to be.' Then she put the kettle on and told me to leave the leaf where the light could reach it.