Two fine line black ankle tattoos on a beach, a small anchor on the left ankle and a palm tree on the right, with sea waves behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and palm tree ankle tattoos on a beach

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare ankles rest on wet sand in front of breaking waves. The left ankle has a small black anchor with a thin red cord or anklet tied near it, and the right ankle has a simple black palm tree with a slender trunk and a few fronds. The thin, even linework and solid black ink are set against a pale blue sea and sky, and the photo is taken from a low angle.

Fine line Ankle Anchor Palm tree Ocean Beach Sand Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The palm came off the lorry from Penzance with its roots wrapped in sacking, and Mr Gorse, who ran the harbour shop, swore it would never survive a Cornish February. Dilys signed for it anyway. She already had the anchor. She had never owned a boat, only her late husband's rusted dinghy that sat on the slipway like a dog waiting for a walk.

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She planted the palm beside the slipway wall where the spray could reach it, and she tied the anchor's old chain to the post so the wind couldn't take it. Her grandson Kit came down on Saturdays with a bucket of sand and opinions. He wanted the tree to be a shipwreck survivor. Dilys said it was a promise she'd made to a man who had once sailed past Madeira and sent her a postcard of a tree that looked nothing like this one.

The winter came in sideways. Waves broke over the wall and the sea took two fence posts and the bench. On the third morning the palm was still standing, leaning hard towards the water, its fronds stripped to bare midribs. Kit stood beside her with his hands in his anorak and said it was dead. Dilys walked down the slipway in her wellingtons, knelt in the wet shingle and pressed her thumb to the trunk. It was green underneath.

By June the fronds had come back broader than before. Kit painted a small anchor on the harbour board to match, and every boat that came in that summer had to pass between them, the hook and the tree, with the sea hissing at the wall. Each spring Dilys let the rope out a little more, and the tree went on leaning towards the water as if it had somewhere to be.