Colour traditional tattoo of a palm tree, red sunset over water and the word ALOHA beneath, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree and sunset with ALOHA lettering

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a palm tree with teal and green fronds above a red setting sun over a blue-green sea with a yellow sky. The word ALOHA sits in black capitals beneath the scene. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated fills give it a classic look, and the design is framed by another dark tattoo at the top edge.

Traditional Forearm Palm tree Sunset Sun Ocean Wave

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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 ward goes quiet at three in a way that feels borrowed, and you are the only one awake enough to hear the drip stand creaking in bay four. Mr Pryce has been calling every nurse "aloha" since he was admitted. The night staff have decided it is the morphine talking, though he insists he has never touched a drop of it and spent thirty years cooking on lifeboats out of Newlyn.

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You check his line and write the obs on the chart in biro. He asks what time the sun went down. You tell him quarter past four, behind the bins of the multi-storey, and he snorts. Where he learned to look at a sunset, he says, it drops red into the water and the sea lights up like someone has switched on a lamp underneath it. He describes a bar on the front at Waikiki with a palm leaning over the sand, and a pair of boots he left under a bench there in 1974 that he has never stopped wanting back.

At half four the buzzer for bay two goes and you run. For an hour there is only blood pressure and a frightened woman asking for her husband, who died in 2009. When you get back to bay four his bed is stripped and the discharge papers have gone. On the water jug someone has left a postcard: a red sun sinking into a teal sea, palm fronds bold as ink, ALOHA in black capitals. On the back, in blocky handwriting, it says: Sorry about the boots. Bought you a new pair.

You take the card home on the first bus. Beyond the window the sky over the ring road has gone the colour of that card, a bruised red hanging above the car park, and you turn it over in your hands and say aloha to the driver, who says morning, love, and means it.