Fine line black palm tree tattoo on the ankle, with a slender trunk rising from the ankle bone to a fan of fronds.

Small palm tree on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small palm tree sits on the side of an ankle, with a thin single-line trunk rising from near the ankle bone to a crown of feathery fronds. The fronds are shaded with fine, dense hatching in dark ink, while the trunk is a single steady line. The tattoo is set against plain, pale skin and a softly blurred blue-grey background, which keeps the focus on the design.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Palm tree Palm Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seedling came through my booth in a coffee tin wrapped in a bus timetable, and the man holding it had clearly rehearsed his answers on the walk over. Plant material, I told him, needs a form. He slid one across the counter with a biro from his own pocket, and I watched him fill in every box except the one asking where the thing had been grown.

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It came from a yard behind a hotel in Limassol, he said, where the last palm on the street had been cut down for a tram line. The wind had nearly pulled it up, so he had dug it out himself at first light. Now it stood no taller than my forearm: one thin stem, and at the top a green fist of leaves still folded like a closed umbrella. I held the tin up to the strip light and thought of my grandfather, who never crossed a border without a pinch of foreign soil in his coat pocket, certain someone would ask for it.

I stamped the form. Then I asked where he meant to plant it, and he said there was a patch of waste ground behind the cargo sheds where nobody would bother it, and where the morning sun cleared the fence. I told him the sheds were mine to lock at six, and that a palm needs more than sunlight, it needs someone who keeps coming back to look at it. He nodded as though I had given him directions.

At six I walked out to the wire. He had gone, but in the bare earth by the fence stood the stem, straight as a ruled line, its leaves just beginning to open against the grey sky. Its shadow lay across the tarmac on the far side, which by the rules of that crossing was not my side, and I did not stamp that either.