Close-up of a small black fine line palm tree tattoo on the lower leg above the ankle, with white canvas sneakers and a pavement behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small palm tree on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A slender palm tree with a thin trunk and a small cluster of fronds is tattooed on the back of a lower leg, just above the ankle. It is drawn in fine black linework with light shading in the fronds, and the design is small and simple. The tattoo sits against warm skin in a daylight street photograph, with white sneakers and paving in the background.

Fine line Ankle Palm tree

Find an artist for this

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

The customs clerk at Harrow Ford had stamped three hundred papers that morning when the carter came up the bank with a child's wooden box under his arm. Inside, wrapped in wet sacking, was a palm seed no longer than a thumb. The clerk asked what it was for. The carter said his mother had grown one in the south, where the wind smelled of salt, and she had asked him to carry it north before she died.

Keep reading

The regulations said plants could not cross the river without a licence, and the licence office was three days' ride away by mule. The clerk looked at the seed for a long time. Then he took a pencil, wrote the name of the carter's mother in the margin of the ledger, and set the box on the shelf behind him, beside a jar of pickled walnuts and a clock that had not run since his father's day.

Years later the bridge was widened and the customs house was moved. Men with tools cut through the cellar floor and found a slender tree there, its trunk bent toward the light from a crack in the stone, its crown of fronds no bigger than a cart wheel. Nobody remembered planting it. The clerk, retired and stooped, came to watch from the fence and said it was the only thing from that shelf that had ever been allowed to stay.

The foreman asked whose it was. The old clerk pointed upriver, where the wind was coming in from the south, and said it belonged to whoever had waited longest for it.