Small solid black palm tree tattoo on the back of an ankle, photographed on a bare foot resting on a wooden floor.

Palm tree on the ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small palm tree is tattooed on the back of a bare ankle, with a slim curved trunk rising to a fan of drooping black fronds. The design is filled in with solid black ink and has a slightly textured, lightly shaded finish along the trunk. It sits near the ankle bone against a plain skin background, with the foot angled towards the camera on a wooden floor.

Botanical Ankle Palm tree Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways across the market since seven, and by ten the awnings sag like wet sails over the fish stalls. You are sheltering under the last tarp by the bus shelter, where Mr Okafor, who has sold tinned mangoes and paraffin here for thirty years, is folding his table. He nods at the potted palm beside his scales. It is no taller than a milk bottle, its trunk bent into a question mark, its fronds drooping black-green in the grey light.

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"Came off a container from Tenerife in March," he says. "Nobody wanted it. Too thin, too stubborn." He wants four pounds. You count coins out of a wet purse, and he tells you the trick as he wraps the pot in a carrier bag: palms lean towards whatever light they're given, so turn it every morning or it will grow crooked for the rest of its life.

You carry it home through streets running like rivers, the trunk pressed against your coat. The flat above the launderette smells of hot cotton, and the radiator knocks all night. Every morning you turn the pot a quarter circle, the way he showed you, and every morning the tip of the trunk tilts back towards the window, as if it has been planning this all along. Weeks go by. The rain does not stop. You begin to suspect the sky has forgotten what the sun looks like.

Then one Tuesday a thin strip of gold slides across the glass, and by evening the palm has leaned so far that its fronds are pressed flat against the pane. You stop turning it. On Sunday you open the window and find one frond already outside, dripping into the gutter, catching the first warm light the street has seen in a month.