Fine line black tattoo of a palm tree, birds and a low sun on an ankle, with a grey knotted heeled shoe below.

Palm tree and birds on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo sits on the inner ankle of a person wearing a black skirt and grey pointed mules with a knotted strap and a striped metallic heel. The tattoo is drawn in thin black linework showing a leaning palm tree, a few small birds and a half-circle sun or island shape, with no shading. The photograph is a close, slightly angled crop against a plain grey floor.

Fine line Ankle Palm tree Bird Sun Island Beach Shoe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The palm had been leaning east for as long as anyone on Skerra could remember, bent over the wet rocks like a gull over a dropped chip. Nobody planted it. It came in on a tide in the spring of 1931, a single coconut wedged in the weed below the pier, and Agnes Foy, who kept the post office and the only hens, pressed it into a tin of sand because she could not bear to watch anything rot that still smelt of somewhere warm.

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Her grandson Tam was sent out every Friday with the ferry crate and a list of things the mainland had forgotten. He thought the palm was a joke the island told itself. Three small birds with forked tails sat in its crown most afternoons and never stirred when the boat came in. Agnes said they were waiting for the sun to climb out of the sea, which it did each morning, a flat orange coin that looked more like a bannock somebody had dropped in the water.

The winter the ferry stopped, Tam was twelve and furious about it. He walked to the point with a torch and found the palm flattened by a gale, its trunk split, the birds gone. He sat down in the wet and cried, then got up and did what Agnes had taught him, staking the thing with driftwood and binding it with rope from the hens' run. It took him all night. By dawn the sky had gone to a thin green line, and the birds were back on the top of the stake as if they had only stepped out for a moment.

He never told her he had been frightened. He said the palm had leaned the other way that year, and she laughed and said the island was always trying to get out of its own road. Decades later, with the post office shut and the tin of sand still on his windowsill, Tam watched the sun come up through the fronds and understood that the palm had never really been leaning. It had been pointing at the sun, the way you point at something you want someone else to see first.