Small black palm tree tattoo with fronds and a long stem on the forearm of a tanned person lying on a striped towel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tanned torso in a striped bikini and orange bottoms lies on a patterned towel, with one arm raised. A small solid black palm tree with a long stem and sparse fronds sits on the forearm. The ink is bold and simple, with the tree shown in silhouette against lightly sunlit skin.

Botanical Forearm Palm tree Stem Bikini

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the tide hasn't finished making up its mind, and I won't tell this twice. You want the palm at the end of the bay, the one with the bent stem? My grandmother's grandmother climbed it the week the Hadley boat went down off the reef. Nobody believed a woman of her size could scale a trunk that leaned like a drunk man, but she did it with a knife between her teeth and a length of tarred rope.

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Up there she found the thing the sea had been keeping from us: a fruit wrapped in its own husk, and three fronds still green enough to hold a shape. She cut them loose one after another and let them fall to the sand, each one pointing a different way, as if the tree were tidying its own sleeves. The gulls screamed at her. The tide came in fast, the way it does when it has been waiting.

Three days later the men came back, not from the reef but from the far side of the island, grey with salt and wearing the clothes of the drowned. They wanted to know which way was home. She held the fronds up one by one to the low sun, and each one threw a shadow across the sand, a black fine line that ran through the scrub to the freshwater spring. That was how they found their way. It is why we still cut palms the old way, the stem long and the fronds sparse, so the shadow is always plain enough to follow.

Some say she never came down. I say she did, and went to bed with sand in her hair, and died a fat old woman in her own hammock. Mind the step going out. The tide is turning, and you have a long walk to the boat with your head full of my nonsense.