Black fine line palm tree tattoo with soft shading on the upper arm of a woman wearing a grey crop top and Calvin Klein waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm tree tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender palm tree with a long curved trunk and sweeping fronds is tattooed on the outer upper arm. The linework is fine and the fronds have soft grey shading that gives some depth. The tattoo is shown in black ink against light skin, with the torso and grey clothing visible in dappled sunlight.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Palm tree Trunk Arm Navel piercing

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

The palm came up through the chapel floor the spring my father sold the boat. Nobody planted it. A seed must have dropped from a passing gull or caught in a goat's coat, and it found the one crack in the flagstones where the old altar had stood. By June it was taller than the north wall, its trunk bent like a question, the fronds throwing shadows across the broken arches so the whole ruin seemed to breathe slowly.

Keep reading

The custodian, Stelios Vrettos, who had kept the keys for thirty years, wanted it cut down before the coach parties started photographing it. I told him a tree that had chosen a castle was not ours to chop. He laughed and said I had been reading too many of the guidebooks my mother wrote. We argued in the gatehouse over a flask of coffee gone cold, and neither of us won.

I went up on the battlements that evening with a torch and a bucket of fresh water. The light came low across the courtyard, cutting the fronds into long grey strips, and the trunk looked almost black where it met the stone. I poured the water at its roots and sat there until the bats came out of the arrow slits. Stelios found me at dusk, saw the empty bucket, and said nothing at all.

By autumn the palm had put out a second crown. Stelios now sweeps the leaves off the chapel step every Monday before the first visitors arrive, and he has stopped calling it the weed. Last week he asked me, quite seriously, whether the castle would be kept up or left to the trees. I said I thought it had already decided.