Fine line black tattoo of a palm tree with a setting sun and small birds on the inside of an ankle, with red platform heels.

Palm tree and sunset on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a palm tree on a small island with a half-set sun and three tiny birds in the sky sits on the ankle. The linework is thin and single-weight in dark grey-black ink, with no shading. The ankle is shown against a beige floor, with a red patent platform sandal and a red-toed foot in the frame.

Fine line Ankle Palm tree Sun Bird Island Sunset

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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 water on the cut was flat as a plate that Tuesday, and I had the tiller in one hand and a mug of stewed tea in the other when Marjorie came up the towpath with her shoes in a carrier bag. Red things, patent, with heels like fence posts. She'd bought them in Birmingham for a wedding she didn't go to, and she was not a woman who wore heels on a towpath, so I said so. She said that was exactly why. Then she sat on the cabin roof and pushed her ankle out at me, and there it was, a little palm tree on a scrap of sand with the sun going down behind it and three birds scratched in the sky like someone had flicked a pen. I asked her where the island was. She said it was the one she'd been meaning to get to since 1971.

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We moored at Hawkesbury that night, under the bridge where the gulls sleep. She told me the palm was her grandad's idea, that he'd drawn it on the back of a fag packet in a Clacton caff and said a man ought to have somewhere to go that wasn't the pub. The tattooist had asked if she wanted colour and she'd said no, the outline was enough, the rest was up to the sea. I thought that was daft until she pointed at the sun, which was only half sunk, and said it had been half sunk for fifty years and she was in no hurry to see it finish.

In the morning she was gone before the kettle boiled. The shoes were on the roof, toes together, as if she'd only stepped off for a minute. I put them in the locker. Three weeks later a postcard came from a place called Pinel Island, with a photo of nothing but sand and a single leaning tree, and on the back, in the same thin hand as the drawing, she'd written: the birds stayed, you owe me a cup of tea.