Two black ink dotwork drawings of palm trees on a beach scene, sketched on translucent paper beside a fine liner pen, shown as tattoo design artwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork palm trees design drawings

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two drawings of palm trees on translucent paper, one with a sky of stippled dots and a palm frond cluster, the other a triangular panel with a leaning palm and a sea horizon. Fine stippling and dense hatching build the shading, with bold solid black fronds and trunks. The work is entirely black ink on pale paper, with a black fine liner pen lying across the top edge.

Dotwork Botanical Palm tree Beach Sea Sky Stipple

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

Pass me that coal, not the black one, the red one still with some life in it. There. Now sit close and keep your questions for after, because this tree has only ever been told one way in this house and I'll not spoil it. Your great-grandfather Edwin brought the seed home from a harbour in Madeira, folded in a wool sock inside his coat, and he planted it in the old glasshouse where the tomatoes used to sulk.

Keep reading

The winter the big snow came, the glass split along one side and the frost crept in. Everyone told him to burn the thing for the warmth it would give. He would not. He sat up three nights in the cold with a paraffin lamp and a sack of hay, and on the third morning the fronds had unfolded black against the white field beyond the pane, and the sky above them had gone speckled, as if someone had flicked a brush of pepper across it. Beneath the trunk, a grey line lay where the sea ought to be, forty miles off over the flat fields and not visible from anywhere in this county.

He died the spring after, and the tree leaned further every year towards that window, as if it were waiting for a bus. My father said it was the draught. My mother said it was homesickness, which is a daft thing to say of a plant. I think it was simply that somebody had told it the sea was out there, and it had believed him.

So when the snow comes, you come and find me out there with my boots off, listening. Put your palm flat on the bark. Feel that? Warm as a sleeping dog. That's the sea, pretending.