Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a palm tree above a shaded oval with clouds and stars, with geometric construction lines, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree and starry oval on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tall palm tree with fine, feathered fronds above a vertical oval filled with cloudy black shading and small star sparkles. Thin geometric lines, arcs and a circle frame the design and extend beyond it. The work is entirely black and grey, with bold solid areas contrasting against the lighter skin tones.

Geometric Blackwork Upper arm Palm tree Star Cloud Oval Circle Sky Geometric line

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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

The stamp in my hand had gone soft from being pressed so many nights, and the lamp above the booth hummed the way it always did after midnight. Past the wire, the palm stood alone on the boundary marker, the only tree for forty kilometres. Two survey crews had argued over where its roots ended and the country began, and both had drawn their lines through it in pencil that never quite agreed.

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Sefton Mair came through on a Tuesday with a rolled chart under his arm and a brass lens in a leather case. He wanted a stamp for a night he would not name. "Date it by the stars," he said, and when I told him the stamp only knew days, he laughed and unrolled the chart across my counter. Someone had drawn the palm in ink, then a tall oval beneath it, shaded dark as a storm, with little crosses for stars, and a circle round the lot, cut through by lines that ran off the edge of the paper.

"The sky over the marker," he said. "Every hour I could get it, through that lens. The circle is the lens. The rest is just where the lines go."

He crossed at four with the chart flat against his chest and the case knocking against his hip. At dawn the sentry called me out. The lens case lay open on the wire, empty, and someone had pinned the chart to the palm's trunk, one thin line running from the highest frond down to the ground, the rest of the sheet left blank.

I still have the stamp. I never used it on him. Some nights I press it to the back of my hand just to feel how it lands.