Small solid black palm tree silhouette tattoo on the upper back of a person in a black strappy top, in sunlight.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black silhouette of a palm tree with a fronded crown and a thin, slightly curved trunk sits on the right side of the upper back, beside the shoulder blade. The ink is dense black with no shading, and the design is set against warm, sunlit skin. The composition is a close, tightly cropped view from behind, with black straps of a top framing the tattoo.

Blackwork Botanical Back Palm tree Palm Silhouette Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had been cutting palm trees out of biscuit tin for three weeks before the harbourmaster came asking why every shutter on Gullet Row had one. She said the trees were for the lamps, which was true. Her father had hung the first lamp in the window of the chandlery the winter the gulls stopped coming inland, and it threw its light across the cobbles in the shape of a tree that had never grown in Tansy Bay.

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The harbourmaster, Mr Pell, didn't care about lamps. He cared that a tin palm had been found nailed to the mast of the Eliza Ann, and that the mast had no tree on it when the boat went out. Mara said nothing. She had cut that one too, in the dark, with her father's snips, and she knew exactly how far the trunk leaned because she had leaned it herself, one bend at a time.

On the last night of the month the fog came up off the water thick as wool. Mara took the lamp down to the quay and held it up where the fog was thinnest. The shadow fell across the water and stood there, one straight line of black with a crown spread wide, and a boat somewhere out past the breakwater turned its bow towards it and came home.

Mr Pell paid her in coins and asked for another. She gave him a dozen tins to cut. Each one, she told him, was for a boat that had not yet decided to come back.