Black and grey tribal sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with a shaded palm tree against a sunset.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree and tribal bands on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and part of the shoulder, combining bold tribal bands with a shaded palm tree silhouetted against a sunset. The outlines are heavy and solid, while the sky and horizon are softened with grey shading. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with the wearer's grey tank top on the left and a wooden surface at the right edge.

Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Palm tree Tribal pattern Sunset Horizon

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the lamp will last until the moon is up if nobody opens the shutter. Now listen. The palm on the western point was never planted by anyone. It came up through the broken coral the season the schooner Halcyon Rose went onto the reef, and from its first morning it leaned out over the water, always towards the place where the sun goes down.

Keep reading

Marama Vale mended nets for her father in those years, and every evening she walked out to the point to watch the light go. Her brother Sefa had sailed on the Halcyon Rose as a boy of fifteen. So she kept a count on the palm's grey trunk, one notch with her knife for each evening no word came back from the trading boats. By the second dry season she had to stand on an upturned crate to reach the top of her count, and the old women said she was wasting good steel on a tree.

Then one dusk the sun sat flat on the sea like a coin left on a table, and a sail came up out of the glare. The whole village ran down the sand. It was not a big hull, and her brother was not standing at the tiller. He was asleep in the bottom with a coil of rope still knotted in his fists, and the man steering had carried him off the reef on a plank. Marama stood by the palm a long while before she went down to the water. She never cut another notch. The tree still leans, and when the sun drops behind it the shadows of those old marks run up the trunk in stripes, like the bands of ink on a sleeve. Count them yourself, if you like. There are more than you would think.