Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a palm tree on a small stippled island, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree on a small island on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small palm tree with a leaning trunk and fronds stands on a low, stippled island with faint wave lines beneath it. The shading is built from fine dots, giving the island a textured, sandy look while the tree uses denser dots and short strokes for its fronds. The image is a close, straight-on view of the ribs, with a partial zigzag tattoo visible at the upper right and a hand holding fabric at the upper left.

Dotwork Botanical Ribs Palm tree Island Wave Zigzag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had taken the jetty twice that winter, so when the post was due on Thursday, Maggie Pryce rowed it out to Hollin Skerry herself, standing in the stern with the sack wedged between her boots. Nobody on the mainland believed there was a palm tree on a rock that size until she came back with salt drying on her coat and a photograph in her pocket.

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That was my mother's story, anyway, told over a stove that never quite warmed the kitchen. The tree had come out in a biscuit tin some forty years before, carried by a doctor from Penzance who said he would have it grow or drown trying. It had done neither. It leaned over the shingle as if listening for boats, its trunk bent so far west that the gulls used its top as a lookout.

The autumn I turned fourteen, a gale stripped the shingle back to the bedrock and left the roots bare as knuckles. My mother knelt in the wet with a spade and a bucket and packed the sand back by hand, grumbling the whole time that the sea had no business being so greedy. I held the lantern. When the last handful went in she sat back on her heels, looked up at the bent trunk, and said the tree had only ever been doing what it was told, which was to lean towards whatever it wanted most.

She pressed a single wet frond flat between the pages of the post ledger and wrote the date underneath, the way you would for anything you meant to keep. I still have that ledger. The frond has gone the colour of weak tea, and when I look out from the mainland on a clear morning, the tree is still leaning in.