Black handwritten lettering reading 'It's not you, it's my inability to stand human beings' with a line-drawn palm tree below, tattooed on a lower leg.

Handwritten quote and palm tree on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a two-part quote in black, hand-drawn capital letters, split by a horizontal rule, with a simple outlined palm tree in the lower corner. The linework is even and uniform, with no shading, and the lettering has an irregular, handwritten feel. The ink is black only, and the photo shows the skin lit with a soft rainbow reflection across the upper right.

Lettering Botanical Calf Quote Handwriting Text Palm tree

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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

Mrs Pardoe at the sorting office gave me the round in March, and it included the forest road, which nobody else wanted. At the far end, past the stile and the bramble tunnel, lived a man called Tobias Crane who had not set foot in the village in nine years. He received one letter a month, always from the same solicitor, and a painted board nailed to his gate told the lane exactly what he thought of visitors.

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The solicitor's letters stopped in October. Then a parcel arrived addressed to Crane, care of the forest, containing a potted palm roughly the size of a small child. The card inside read: For the garden. Not for you. Ignore the note. I strapped it to the rack of my bicycle and walked the whole way up, which took the better part of an afternoon, and found him behind the gate in a jumper with holes at both elbows, watching me wrestle the thing off the saddle.

"Who's it from?" he said.

"Your solicitor, I think. There's a card." He read it twice, then took the palm from me without a word and set it beside the gate, facing the lane, as though it might want to see the road. I left him to it. Nine years of silence had made him a poor talker, I suppose, and a worse judge of gifts.

The next month there was a note taped to his letterbox, in square capitals: TELL HER THANK YOU. I did not know who her was, and I never asked. The palm had been watered. By April it was leaning a few degrees towards the village, as if it had decided on its own to go for a walk.