Fine line tattoo of a palm tree on a small island with a red sun above the water, on the inner forearm of a person wearing rings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree island and red sun on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a palm tree standing on a tiny island sits on the forearm, with a solid red sun setting over thin horizontal lines of water beneath it. The palm and island are drawn in fine black linework with light shading, while the sun is filled in red. The black and white photograph is framed close on the forearm and the relaxed hand below, with plain white background.

Fine line Forearm Palm tree Island Sun Sea 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

You stop counting the days on the fourteenth, when the bosun's tally board goes over the side with the rest of the rubbish and nobody bothers to fetch it back. From then on you tell time by the sun, which goes down red over the empty stern, and by the soup, which Ruth in the galley salts for thirty men whether they eat it or not.

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Old Halvorsen swears there's a sandbar out past the Trades with a single palm on it, planted by a deckhand who never made it home. He says it's on no chart because the sea keeps shifting it, and you only see it if you've stopped looking. You think he's drunk on the cheap rum from the second locker, but you watch the horizon anyway on the eight-to-twelve, elbow on the rail, sleeve rolled up against the spray.

On the nineteenth evening the sun sinks so slowly that the whole sky turns the colour of the ink you bought in Lisbon from a man who sold it out of a jam jar. And there it is, a grey hump of sand with one palm leaning off it like someone waving. Nobody else sees it. The engine room bell rings for the change of watch, and when you look again the island has slid under the swell, the palm last to go.

You take the ink from your pocket and the needle from the bosun's kit, and by the time the lamp is lit there is a small black palm on your forearm with a red blot beneath it where the sun went down. Halvorsen sees it at breakfast and nods, as if you have finally paid a debt he never asked you for. The chart office will still show nothing between the Azores and the Cape. You have never been more certain of a place.