Black and grey palm tree tattoo with the word island beneath it on one forearm, and a thin fine line wave on the other forearm, with both palms facing up.

Palm tree and wave forearm tattoos

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with palms up, one bearing a black and grey palm tree with shaded trunk and fronds, and the word island in small script near the wrist. The other forearm has a single thin, unshaded wave outline in fine line work. The plain background and soft natural light keep the focus on the tattoos.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Palm tree Wave Island Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Osric had rowed the ferry between Ness and the low island of Carrow for thirty winters, and in all that time he had never seen a palm tree on Carrow. The island had sand, gorse and a slate-roofed chapel, nothing that bent in the wind the way the sailors' stories said palms did. So when the merchant's widow stepped down onto his landing stage with a sapling wrapped in wet sacking, he laughed and asked her what on earth she meant to do with it.

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"Plant it where the sea stops," she said. "My husband sailed to a place where they grow in rows along the shore. He said a tree goes where it is loved, not where it is told."

The crossing was rough. A swell lifted the boat and set it down hard, and the sapling slid against Osric's boots. The widow kept one hand flat on the wet sacking the whole way and traced a curl in the air above the gunwale with her finger, over and over, as though she were drawing a wave onto the wind. When they grounded at Carrow she carried the sapling up the beach herself and set it at the high-tide line. She pressed a flat grey stone against its root and scratched a single word into it with a nail: ISLAND.

The winter storm took half the beach and the stone with it. Osric expected to find nothing in spring. Instead there was a green fan of fronds standing at the tideline, and beside it, pushed up through the shingle, the stone, still bearing its word. Nobody on Carrow has ever said the tree was a miracle. They only say the ferry now steers by it, and that at noon its shadow falls across the sand in long, slanted bands, rolling in towards the water like the line she drew in the air.