Fine line black tattoos of a palm tree above a wave on two wrists, plus curved lettering on a forearm, as two people hold hands on sand.

Palm tree and wave tattoos on two wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold hands on sand with a heart traced into it. Each wrist carries a small black palm tree above a wavy line, and one forearm has a block of lettering set in a curved shape. The linework is fine and black, and the warm sandy tones fill most of the composition.

Fine line Lettering Botanical Forearm Hand Palm tree Wave Lettering Hand Heart Sand

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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 tide has already taken the heart by the time you reach the slipway, so Marnie is drawing it again with the heel of her boot, scraping the sand into a lopsided shape while the gulls argue over a dropped pasty. You tell her the sea will only take it back. She says that is rather the point, and hands you the stick.

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Nobody in Porthkerris grows palm trees. The one in the window of the travel agent's on Quay Street is plastic, with a faded price tag, and the old men say the nearest real one is somewhere past Lisbon. Marnie bought two small ink palms from a man who came off a trawler with a box of pens and a sore hand. She insisted you both have one: a palm standing on a single wavy line, so the sea could never be far from the tree. You thought it was daft. You still have yours.

Years later the ferry timetable changed twice and the cafe on the harbour wall was sold to someone who painted it grey. You went back in March with sleet blowing sideways across the car park and found the slipway bare, the sand flattened where the tide had levelled everything. Then you saw a heart scratched into the concrete beside the bollard, shallow and half worn away, with two sets of initials inside it and a small palm drawn underneath.

You did not cry. You stood with your hands in your coat pockets until the ferry horn sounded, then knelt and traced the line once more with a finger, the way she used to, letting the grit collect under your nail. Some things are only meant to last until the next high tide, and it is enough that someone bothered to draw them.