Small fine line palm tree with birds and a sun over a shoreline in grey ink on an ankle, with a brown patent heeled shoe.

Palm tree and island on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a slender ankle with a small tattoo of a palm tree leaning over a shoreline, with a sun or half-sun and three tiny birds in the sky. The tattoo uses thin, sketchy black linework with little or no shading, and the ink appears grey on the pale skin. The leg is shown in profile against a light, textured floor, beside a brown patent heeled shoe with a white panel and a large green square buckle.

Fine line Ankle Palm tree Bird Island Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill at Lowmoor the week after the salt wind took the chapel roof, and it brought with it a painted caravan that nobody had ordered. Its owner was a woman called Edda Crane who sold nothing but a single sheet of paper, folded small, and told each buyer the same thing: draw the place you would most like to be when the ground stops moving.

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Maggie Penhallow bought one for a penny from the cart's little brass tray. She was nine and wanted the sea, so she drew a lone palm bent over a spit of sand, three gulls scratched above it like commas, and a half sun sinking into the line of the water. When she handed it back, Edda held it up to the lantern and nodded once. Keep it close, she said. Put it where you'll see it when you're working.

Maggie never went to the sea. She married a carter, buried her mother, and kept the paper in a tin under the stairs, but the fair remembered her. Every time it came back to Lowmoor, something small in the field would go missing and turn up in the tin: a lost ring, a child's shoe, a pair of spectacles. Edda would only say that the sea was a long way off and the ground was soft, and that a drawn island is easier to stand on than a real one.

The summer Maggie was old, the caravan did not come. She went out to the field anyway and found a pale green patch of grass where the wheels had stood, with three gulls walking through it and a bent palm stem pressed flat under the rain.