Colour realism tattoo of a palm tree, a yellow hibiscus and pink plumeria flowers with green leaves, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree and hibiscus on the upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A full-colour tattoo of a palm tree with a large yellow hibiscus and two pink plumeria flowers, with green leaves growing from the base. The fronds and petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail, and a pale turquoise wash sits behind the flowers. The design is centred on the upper back, with the palm rising diagonally toward the shoulder.

Realism Botanical Back Palm tree Hibiscus Plumeria Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting came in a jam jar wrapped in wet Cornish newspaper, and nobody at the Harlow Street glasshouse expected it to live. Mr Ansell unwrapped it on the potting bench and tutted. The stem was grey and soft as a bruise. "Plumeria won't survive a Pennine February," he said, and he said it to me, not to the cutting, which is how I knew he had already found it a place on the warmest shelf.

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For a month we kept it there beside a hibiscus that had been dropping buds since Christmas. We wrapped the pots in sacking, ran the paraffin heater through the night and turned the bottom-heat tap a fraction at a time while we talked about nothing much. Ansell had gone to sea as a boy, before his knees gave out, and he told me the palms on the quay at Mombasa leaned over the water as if they were listening. I never knew whether to believe him. I suspected he had invented half the harbour to keep me pricking out seedlings until dark.

In the third week of March a green nub appeared at the tip, then a swelling, then one pale pink flower with a yellow throat, opening the same morning the council letter arrived about the lease. Ansell read it twice, folded it into his breast pocket and stood looking at the bloom for so long that the kettle boiled dry behind him.

We did not save the building. We did take the cutting home in its jar, and it rooted on my kitchen windowsill above the sink, where it still flowers every spring. Each time it does, I think of the way he said listening, as though the palms had been waiting all along for us to come back.