Black and grey realism tattoo of palm trees above a beach and waves on an upper arm and shoulder, with blue script lettering above, shown from three angles.

Palm trees and beach on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two palm trees silhouetted against a pale sky, with a calm sea and breaking waves along a sandy shoreline below. The palm fronds and waves are rendered in dark, smooth shading with fine highlights on the water, and the horizon line gives the composition depth. Blue script lettering runs across the upper shoulder area, and the three photographs show the design from front, side and back angles.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Palm tree Beach Sea Wave Script Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second palm had leaned further since the storm, and Mateo spent the first hour of light wedging it upright with driftwood and a coil of rope older than his nephew. The sea had come up the sand to the foot of the trunk and gone back again, leaving its wrack in neat grey lines, the way it always did when it had finished with something.

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Four men had gone out on the Esperanza the night before the storm. Three came back on the morning tide, sunburnt and quiet. The fourth, his brother Rafa, was found two days later on the rocks at Punta Negra, asleep as if he had only stopped to rest. Mateo did not know what to say to the sea for doing that. So he wrote on a slate from the boat shed, in chalk that squeaked, the only words he could find, and he propped the slate against the palm where the tide would reach it.

In the morning the slate was gone. In its place lay a single white conch, opened clean along one edge, and the water had already drawn a fine line of foam around it. Mateo picked it up and found the chalk still on his fingers. He walked up the beach towards the house with the light coming over the water, and for the first time since the storm he did not turn to see whether the palms were still standing.