Black linework tattoo of a breaking wave and three solid black palm trees on the outer ankle and heel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Palm trees and wave on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a foot showing a tattoo of a curling wave in outline on the side of the heel, with three solid black palm tree silhouettes rising from a small strip of sand beside it. The wave is drawn with fine outlines and some interior detail, while the palms are filled in solid black. The design is in black ink only, set against pale skin on a lilac cloth.

Ankle Wave Palm tree Beach Sand Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The postcard rack outside the Sandbanks kiosk had been rained on so often that the palm trees had gone soft at the edges, and Marnie Tolley spent a full ten minutes choosing one for her brother before she admitted she was really looking for an excuse to stay out of the flat. Dev had sent her three messages since breakfast asking whether the tide was in or out. She did not answer any of them. She bought a card of a wave curling over a pier, wrote nothing on the back, and walked down to the strip of sand where the rocks ran out.

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The wind had dropped and the water lay flat and grey, the way it did before the weekend crowds came and spoiled it. Three palms stood on the dune behind the groyne, bent by a storm years back and never straightened, looking like they had been dragged there from somewhere warmer and were sulking about it. Dev had drawn them for her once on a napkin in the chip shop, the summer he said they would leave for Lisbon together. He had drawn the wave too, a fat curl with lace along its lip, and she had kept the napkin in her purse for a year until it fell apart.

She sat on the cold concrete and watched a single surfer paddle out past the buoy, small and stubborn, waiting for a set that never came. When the sun pushed through, the sand turned the colour of toast and the palms threw long black shadows across it. Marnie took out her phone, typed a reply to Dev at last, deleted it, and typed one line instead: the tide is coming in. Then she stood up, shook the sand off her heels, and went to meet him at the slipway.