Small fine line black and grey palm tree tattoo on the forearm, with soft shading on the fronds and a curved trunk.

Small palm tree on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small palm tree sits alone on pale skin, with a curved trunk that narrows towards a short base and a crown of drooping fronds. The fronds are shaded with fine stippled marks in grey and black, while the trunk uses lighter, finer lines. The background is softly blurred, leaving the tattoo as the clear focus of the composition.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Palm tree Palm Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coconut came ashore in the wrack on a Tuesday, brown and bruised, still wearing a sailor's knot of tarred twine. Nobody on Scarra had ever seen a palm, and Morag Tulloch said it was a sin to plant a thing that would only drown in our weather. I dug a hole in the lee of the byre anyway, carrying the black soil up from the strand in my apron, and pressed the nut in with both thumbs the way my mother pressed bread.

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It came up in the spring as a green spear no thicker than a knitting needle. By August the trunk had found its own lean, bending out over the water as if it were reading the sky for news. The fronds grew long and thin and hung down like wet washing, and when the drizzle came off the Minch they caught it in fine beads that glinted like grey pins.

Iain's boat went out in March and did not come back on the tide. Morag brought round a casserole and a pamphlet about grief. I brought nothing to anyone. I sat under the palm instead, which is ridiculous, because it gives no shade worth the name, and listened to the trunk creak in the wind like a door nobody had the heart to shut.

Three winters on, the village wants to prop it with driftwood. They say it will snap in the first gale. I told them to leave it be. This morning one frond lifted when the others did not, turning towards the harbour mouth, and out past the skerry a sail came round with the sun behind it. I stood in the wet grass and let the tree keep its own bearing.