Realism tattoo of palm trees silhouetted against a sunset over the sea, wrapping around the forearm and shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm trees and sunset on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three photographs show the same forearm tattoo from different angles. It depicts tall palm trees with fronds in the foreground, a hazy sky and a low horizon, with rippling sea below a band across the lower forearm. The palms and fronds are shaded in black and dark grey, while the sky and water use reddish-brown and orange tones for a sunset effect.

Realism Forearm Palm tree Sunset Sea Wave Horizon Sky Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shush now, and mind the coal scuttle. I'm coming to the palms, so keep your questions in your pockets. My Tomos worked the Glyn pit for thirty-one years, and his brother Idris went to sea on a tramp steamer the year before the strike. Idris sent one postcard home. It showed three palm trees leaning over a beach at sunset, the sea the colour of brandy, and on the back he had written, Tom, it is always warm here and nobody owns the water. Tomos pinned it inside his locker, under the lamp check.

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Then came the autumn the roof came down in the number four heading. Eleven men were under the fall and the rescue crew could only get in by tapping through the rock. Tomos was in the dark for nineteen hours with a broken shoulder and a lamp that kept guttering. He had nothing to count but his own breath, so he counted the waves he had never heard. He told the men beside him about the beach on the postcard, how the fronds rattled like dry paper when the wind came off the water, and they tapped their picks against the stone in time with him so the rescuers would know where they were.

When they got him out, the first thing he asked for was not water but a pencil, because he wanted to draw the three palms before he forgot the lean of them. He never saw the real sea. He didn't need to. Years later he had the sunset put on his forearm by a man in Merthyr, a band of red and brown running down to the wrist, and he said it was the only part of him that had ever been on a holiday. So when you ask me whether it's true, I tell you the sea is as true as the coal. Now go and wash your hands before your mother sees.