Tattoo Artist Uses Real Leaves As Stencils For The Freshest Of Ink

These tats leave a real impression.

Ukrainian tattoo artist Rita Zolotukhina uses leaves as stencils to create what she calls "live leaf tattoos." The result is some beautifully botanical ink.

The 23-year-old artist, who's been making these works of art for about a year now, presses leaves or flowers dipped in stencil ink onto the clients' bodies during the tattoo process.

By creating a tattoo stencil -- or the helpful outline over which artists ink -- with the actual leaf, she can create a more true-to-form image than a stencil made from a sketch. Her approach yields a tattoo that captures exactly how, for example, the plant’s stem bends or the leaf vein’s wind. Then she inks in the details, using nature as her guide for coloring and shading.

While she's always liked incorporating nature into her artwork, she realized this particular technique would be the best way to reveal the plants' true beauty.

"I wanted the tattoo to be as natural as the plant itself. It’s impossible to get it with a sketch – you would interpret the object in your own way, and the result is always a styled picture," she explained to HuffPost. "[These] prints look in harmony with a human body."

Zolotukhina's first tattoo of this sort was of a dandelion leaf for her best friend and she was ecstatic with the way it turned out. She says she's done about 20 of these live leaf tattoos by now and one of her favorites remains a tattoo of a willow branch. Though it was by no means a simple tattoo, she says it was definitely worth the challenge.

"It was the only one that required two sessions and it was quite ambitious to draw not a leaf, but the whole branch. I worried a lot," she said. "But I was extremely satisfied -- the willow seems to have always been here, on the leg."

We can only imagine how gorgeous a forest of these tattoos must be!