Black and grey flash design of a palm tree above a dripping night sky with stars and a crescent moon, drawn on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree over a dripping night sky

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A palm tree leans over a dark, dripping block that holds a night sky of stars, dots and a crescent moon. Distant hills and three birds sit behind the tree. The linework is bold and solid, with stippled dotwork shading on the hills and the palm fronds, and the design is centred on a plain cream paper background.

Traditional Dotwork Palm tree Night sky Moon Star Bird Mountain Hill Drip

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down before the kettle goes cold, love, and mind the mop bucket by your foot. It's three in the morning and the corridor lights only hum when nobody's listening, so you'll want my grandfather's story while they're humming. He swore the night sky once came loose over Pegwell Bay like wet paper tearing, and a slab of it dropped low over the sea, dark, stippled with stars, with a crescent moon hanging in one corner like a clipped fingernail.

Keep reading

Tobias Renn was out on the pier that evening, mending a net with cold hands, and he saw the slab sag and drip. The ink fell in slow black ropes that set hard on the water. Halfway down, there was a palm tree growing out of the underside of the dark, its roots lost in the stars, and it leaned out over the bay as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. Three birds came from nowhere and turned slow circles above the fronds, and Tobias says he counted them twice, then gave up and rowed out.

He climbed the trunk, which was ridged like a ship's rope, and he touched a drip. It tasted of salt and old pennies. He stayed until the tide turned, and every star he counted went out the moment he blinked at it, so he learned to count with his eyes shut. When he came home at dawn, his wife asked where he had been all night, and he told her, nowhere, only up.

The slab was gone by the next morning, but there was a crescent of dried ink on the pier boards, and Tobias scrubbed at it for a month and never got it out. Every night after that he left the porch light on for the birds. Right, that's the lift. Mind the bucket, I said.