Traditional colour tattoo of a palm tree, sunset over the sea and red and blue flowers within gold scrollwork on a leg, shown in a three-panel collage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree sunset with scrollwork on a leg

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo shows a palm tree on a sandy shore beside a calm sea, with a red and yellow sunset and a dark hill on the horizon. Thick gold scrollwork wraps around the scene, with red and blue flowers and green leaves at the top and bottom. The black outlines are solid and the colour fills are flat and saturated, and the two side panels repeat close crops of the palm tree.

Traditional Other Palm tree Sunset Sea Flower Scrollwork Hill Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush was already loaded with gold size when Eli Carrow told her the palm had to lean left, towards the harbour wall, because that was where his brother used to stand and wave. Dora Lusk had painted forty transoms in her working life and had never once been asked to make a tree point at anything. She wiped the brush on the rag tucked into her apron and looked at the boat, the Marguerite, hauled up on the slip with her stern bare and grey.

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Eli wanted the sunset red enough to hurt, the kind he had seen from a deckchair in a place he only ever called Over There. Dora mixed vermilion with a drop of lamp black so it would not sit too bright on the wood. Behind the palm she laid down a low hill, dark as a mussel shell, and a strip of sea so flat it looked like pewter poured into a tray. Gulls came down to inspect the work and left again, unimpressed.

The scrollwork took longest. She drew it freehand, a long curl of gold that swept round the whole scene like a hand cupping a match, and at the bottom she set red and blue flowers with leaves dark as ink. Eli watched her outline the last petal and said nothing, which she had learned was the highest compliment a fisherman paid.

On the morning the Marguerite went back in the water, Dora stood on the slip with her hands in her pockets. The paint was still tacky, so the boat sat on its stand a while longer. When the tide finally lifted her, the palm tipped towards the harbour wall and the gold curl caught the first sun, and for a moment the transom looked like a window onto somewhere warm. Eli lifted a hand from the wheelhouse. Dora lifted hers back.