Fine line black palm tree tattoo on a bare upper back near the shoulder, with long highlighted hair falling beside it against a pale blue background.

Palm tree on upper back

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A slim black palm tree with a long, straight trunk and a small crown of fronds sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is fine and even, with the fronds drawn as tapered strokes and a little shading. The bare back fills most of the frame against a pale blue background, with long highlighted hair falling down one side and no face shown.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Back Palm tree Palm Tree Trunk Frond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at Gorrenmouth had gone brackish the summer the tide took the old quay, and Marta Penhallow walked up the cliff path every morning to carry water from the spring above the chapel. Her grandmother had told her the spring ran sweet because of the palm that grew beside it, though no one in the parish had ever seen a palm tree in Cornwall, and the nearest was said to stand in a warm country across the sea, on a shore where the fishermen's boats were painted white.

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On the thirtieth morning a stranger sat on the chapel wall with a leather satchel and a tin box of needles. He had come off the Falmouth packet with no coat, and he asked her, very politely, whether the spring had a tree beside it. Marta said it did not, only gorse and a stone trough. He nodded as though he had expected as much, opened the tin, and showed her a slim black palm drawn in ink on a scrap of paper, its trunk straight as a mast.

He said a palm grows tall because it has nothing to lean on, and a thing that stands alone learns to keep its crown high. Marta laughed at him, then went quiet, and at dusk she took his needle and pricked the same palm onto the soft skin below her shoulder blade, where no one would see it unless she wanted them to. The water in the spring tasted sweet that night, and the next morning she carried her buckets down to the quay with her head up, the way a palm holds its fronds to the wind.