Colourful neo-traditional tattoo on a person's upper back showing a palm tree, flamingo, dolphin, inflatable ring and boombox.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Retro palm tree and boombox on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the upper back and shoulder area, centred on a green palm tree in front of a yellow sun set within a lilac triangle. Around it sit a pink flamingo, a grey dolphin, a pink inflatable ring, a boombox and several coloured geometric shapes, all with bold black outlines and dot-stippled shading. The bright palette of pink, teal, yellow and green is set against the person's skin, with the rest of the body and a black top visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Back Palm tree Flamingo Dolphin Sun Geometric shape Sunset

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three in the morning the ward has gone the colour of weak tea, and you are the only one awake who knows where the spare blankets are kept. Bed nine has been asking for the sea since midnight. Mr Pearce, ninety-one, a retired lifeguard from Margate, swears he can smell chlorine under the hand gel, and he won't settle until somebody proves otherwise.

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The boombox belongs to the physio, Dev, who left it in the sluice cupboard after a community fete. It is a chunky thing with a cracked handle and a cassette door that sticks. You find a tape labelled 'Summer 86' in his own handwriting, its edges furred with age. You press play and the room fills with a synth bassline so bright it seems to bounce off the cream curtains. Mr Pearce's eyes open. He taps his fingers on the sheet in time, and the corridor light catches the tubing in his arm like spray.

'Turn it up,' he says, and you do, though the night sister will have words about it. He tells you about the pink ring he used to drag out to the buoys at Westgate, and how the flamingos on the boating lake stood on one leg as if waiting for a bus. He tells you the sun always set behind palm trees in his memory, though there were none on the Kent coast, only a stubborn tamarisk. You don't correct him. You sit on the plastic chair and let the tape hiss through the second side.

Near dawn, when the blinds begin to grey, he is asleep with his mouth open and one hand still tapping. You switch the boombox off and the silence sounds like a pool closing for the season. On the windowsill a paper cup holds a single pink carnation that someone's daughter left yesterday. You straighten it, check the drip, and go to find the handover sheet, humming the tune under your breath all the way down the corridor.