Two small black palm tree tattoos in fine-line style, one on the upper arm of a person in a patterned shirt and one on the ribs of a person standing beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching palm tree tattoos on arm and ribs

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand side by side, showing a palm tree tattoo on the upper arm of one and a smaller palm tree on the left side of the ribs of the other. Both trees have a slender trunk and fronds drawn in fine black lines with soft grey shading. The image is in black and grey, with a plain pale background and the subjects cropped at the shoulders and hips.

Fine line Upper arm Ribs Palm tree Palm Tree Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bodashtart, the offshoot came through the salt in good order, though the boatman cursed it all the way from the quay at Sidon. I wrapped its root ball in wet sacking and wedged it in the hold between the jars of resin, and when the wind died off the headland I lay awake listening to the sail slap and thinking of the mother tree it came from.

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You will remember that Father planted her the year you were born, beside the cistern where the goats used to shelter from the noon heat. Her trunk leans a little toward the east, as if she is listening for the fishing boats, and her fronds are fine as the pen strokes a scribe makes when he is tired. I cut this shoot clean at the base and I cut another for myself, so that they are sisters, grown from one root. Plant yours where the afternoon sun reaches the courtyard wall, so that it will throw a shadow across the water jar. Do not let the women persuade you to move it when the first leaves look thin. They always look thin in the first year.

The boatman asked me why a grower would sail a stick across open sea when a man could buy dates at the market for a single shekel. I told him a palm keeps time better than any sundial, since it takes a decade to decide what it will be. He laughed and said I was a fool, and perhaps I am.

I have tied a strip of my own palm bark to the bottom of this letter. Measure your tree against the wall each new moon, and when its shadow reaches the second brick, send word. My shadow reached it last month.