Black ink flash design of a palm tree with the words Less Monday and More summer set in brush script either side of the trunk.

Palm tree with "Less Monday, more summer" lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A single palm tree with a tall, thin trunk and a crown of drooping fronds drawn in heavy black ink with visible hatching. The words "Less Monday" and "More summer" are set in brush-style script on either side of the trunk, with smaller spaced capitals reading LESS and MORE above them. The design is entirely black on a plain white background, centred and evenly balanced.

Lettering Botanical Palm tree Palm Lettering Quote Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had been told the palm would not survive a Lincolnshire winter, and she said so to the man at the nursery, who had sold it to her anyway for two shillings and a look of pity. It arrived on the Tuesday carrier wrapped in sacking, and she stood it in a half barrel outside the chemist's on Harbour Row, where it dripped on the step and made the whole street stop to argue about it.

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Her husband Len had died the previous spring after forty years at the gasworks, having never once been further south than Skegness. He had kept a calendar with every Monday crossed through in red pencil, a habit she found more tiresome than she had let on. Monday was for the mangle and the ledger and the long queue at the butcher's. The palm, she decided, would be the opposite of all that.

Through the summer the town came to lean on it. Boys tied their kites to the trunk, the vicar's wife sketched it for a church bazaar, and on each Monday morning Ada sat on a folding stool beside it with a flask of tea and a cardboard sign she had lettered herself in a brush hand: LESS MONDAY, MORE SUMMER. People laughed, then read it again, then stayed for a cup.

In September a letter came from the council, politely asking who had authorised a tree on the public pavement. Ada wrote back that it had been authorised by Len, who had never once asked permission for anything, and that they were welcome to come and measure its shadow themselves. Nobody came. The shadow, long and thin across the cobbles at four o'clock, stayed exactly where she had put it.