Close view of a small black palm tree tattoo with a thin stem on the upper arm of a woman seen from behind, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small palm tree on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind sits on a white bed, with her long wavy brown hair falling over her shoulder. A small black palm tree with a thin trunk and a spiky crown sits on the upper arm, drawn with fine, clean linework and solid black ink. The image is in soft natural light, with a white and neutral palette and the tattoo as the main point of focus.

Fine line Upper arm Palm tree Palm Woman Bed Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The palm had come off a banana boat in a crate stamped Madeira, and by the time Nell Tregarthen carried it up the slipway in her arms, the frost had already got to two of its fronds. She set it in a bucket on the harbour wall and told the gulls to mind their business.

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The harbour master said it would never survive a Cornish February. Nell said the Cornish February had never met anything as stubborn as her. She wrapped the trunk in sacking, carried it home each night in the bottom of the fish cart, and talked to it the way her father had talked to the boats, low and without much hope.

By March the fronds had gone brown at the edges, and the cart men began to wager on it. Nell paid them no attention. She had written to a nursery in Penzance, and a reply came back in a clerk's neat hand saying the species was not hardy and she should not waste her money. She folded the letter into the sacking and went on wrapping.

In April a single frond unrolled from the crown, pale green and creased like a letter kept too long in a pocket. Nell sat on the wall until the tide turned, then walked home without the bucket and told nobody. She left the empty pot by the back step where the light came in, and the new frond bent towards the water as if it already knew the way out.