Black and grey realistic tattoo of two palm trees, hibiscus and plumeria flowers, a distant island and a pale sun on skin.

Palm trees, hibiscus and setting sun

Botanical · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two palm trees on a small island, with hibiscus and plumeria flowers in the foreground, a distant mountain ridge and a large sun low over the water. The work uses soft grey shading and fine dark outlines, with highlights left as bare skin in the sun glow and the sea reflections. The image is entirely black and grey, and the close crop centres the design with little of the surrounding body visible.

Botanical Realism Palm tree Sun Island Hibiscus Plumeria Flower Sea Mountain Sunset Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tin of cadmium orange went dry on the Tuesday, so Ernie Vosper mixed what remained, which was lamp-black, a jar of whitening he used for skirting boards, and a spoonful of umber, and told the landlady it would look better in grey anyway. Maureen Pask did not believe him. She had ordered a Pacific island for the public bar of the Anchor at Bude, two palms leaning over a bush of hibiscus, and what she had was a wall the colour of weak tea.

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Ernie had never seen a palm tree outside a biscuit tin. He worked from postcards his brother Len had sent from Tonga before the navy stopped sending anybody home, and he learned the fronds by copying them onto newspaper first, the way Len's letters described things, badly and with enthusiasm. The plumeria took him three evenings. Each flower had five petals and he drew each one twice, once to get it right and once because the first had come out looking like a pair of hands.

On the Friday Maureen came in after closing, stood with her arms folded, and watched him finish the sun. It was a pale disc he had left as bare plaster, with a dark smear of cloud laid across the bottom. "That's not finished," she said. "It's a hole." He said it was the light. She said the light was meant to be yellow. He said he had only got grey, and she looked at him for a long while, then took a carpenter's pencil from behind her ear and wrote LEN in small capitals on the bottom step, where the carpet met the boards.

"Leave the sun bare," she said. "Let them fill it in themselves."