Black and grey fine line palm tree tattoo with a small coconut cluster on the inner forearm, with small script lettering below it.

Palm tree with script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded palm tree with a curved trunk and fan-shaped fronds sits on the inner forearm, with a small cluster of coconuts at the crown. The leaves and trunk are drawn with fine lines and hatched shading in grey and black. A short line of cursive script sits below the trunk, and the plain skin and tiled floor fill the background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Palm tree Script Trunk Frond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Everyone on the quay at Newlyn agreed the coconut was dead. It had come ashore after a gale, brown and hollow-sounding, wedged between a crab pot and a length of rope, and Tom Pascoe said a thing that had crossed that much water had no business still wanting to grow. Ruth said nothing. She took it home in her coat pocket and set it on the windowsill above the sink, where the light was weakest and the kettle steamed against the glass every morning.

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By March a pale green shoot had split the husk at one end, thin as a bootlace and bent like a question. Ruth dug a pot from the shed, filled it with sand from the car park and grit from her father's old boots, and set the nut in it with the shoot pointing at the window. Tom came round to look and said she'd been had by a shop-bought fern. She let him say it. She had stopped arguing with men on the quay about things they had not watched happen.

It took two summers. The first frond unfolded like a folded letter, then a second, then a crown that rattled against the ceiling whenever the back door opened. The third year she carried the pot down to the sea wall on a bright morning and stood it in the sun, and the wind off the bay lifted the leaves the way a hand lifts a sleeve to check a watch.

In the spring after, she dug a hole in the cold patch behind the wall, tipped the sand out with the pot, and set the roots down in the salt-stained earth. Tom watched from the gate with his hands in his pockets. By August there were three small green fruit hanging at the crown, and he came round without being asked to count them.