Gold metallic design of three palm trees with the word SMILE, with a small palm tree in place of the letter I, on a white background.

Gold palm trees with SMILE lettering

Colour · Flash

The design shows three palm tree silhouettes in gold foil, two tall and one smaller at the lower left, with a further small palm tree forming the letter I in the word SMILE. The palm fronds are solid filled shapes with feathered edges, and the lettering is a simple sans serif in the same gold tone. The subject is centred on a plain white background with no body part or skin visible.

Palm tree Palm Smile Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf kept lifting off the brush every time the wind came up the promenade, so Dennis Cale gave up on the S and the M and went to find Mrs Pryce about the I.

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She was counting deckchairs in the yard behind the Palm Court and did not look up. "The I is a stick, Dennis. It has always been a stick. Like a bus stop." She tapped the chalk outline with her umbrella, and a little of the chalk came off on the ferrule. He had drawn the other letters tall and round and sure of themselves, and the I looked as if it had been left out in the rain.

He sat on an upturned crate and drew a palm on the back of a delivery note, the kind his grandfather used to cut from card for the church fete, every frond pulled down by its own weight. He had used the same trees on the hotel's postcards for twenty years, and the people who bought them had never once asked why the trees leaned so hard in a sea breeze that never quite reached the town.

"That," said Mrs Pryce, and for the first time she came over and stood close. "Put that in."

It took him two days. The little tree sat at the foot of the letter like someone who had stopped to wait, and when he finished, the gold caught the light from the bar door and threw it across the wet pavement. That evening a couple from Leeds stood beneath the sign with their suitcases, reading it twice, and then the woman laughed without quite knowing why. Mrs Pryce watched them from the doorway with her hand flat against her chest, and said nothing about the price of the leaf.