Close view of a fine line black palm tree tattoo on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade, with dark hair falling across the shoulder.

Small palm tree on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A slim black palm tree sits on the upper back, with a fan of drooping fronds at the top and a long, thin trunk running downward. The linework is fine and the tattoo is in solid black ink with soft shading in the fronds. The soft-focus background and warm skin tones keep the tattoo as the clear focal point, with the person's face turned away from the camera.

Fine line Back Palm tree Trunk

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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

You find the palm the way you find most things on the farm in January, by walking out before light with the torch clamped in your teeth to see what the frost has done. The glasshouse door sticks on its runner. Inside, the air is thick with wet compost and the paraffin heater your father swore he would replace. The palm stands where your mother put it forty years ago, a spindly thing grown from a seed she brought home from Madeira in a jam jar, and it has never once looked comfortable in Cornwall.

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Frost has got into the crown overnight. The fronds hang down like wet washing. You kneel on the sacking with the cold coming up through your knees and work the old hessian off the lower trunk, one knot at a time, the way she taught you. Ned from the next farm leans in the doorway with his hands deep in his coat and says it's finished, love, and you don't answer him. You have heard that before, from men at the auction who wanted the top field for barley.

You stay until the light goes grey over the hedge. You tie the fronds loosely together with baler twine so their weight won't split them, drag the heater closer, and talk to the thing the way she did, about the price of feed, the ewe with the bad foot, the letter from the council about the lane.

In the second week of February, when you have nearly stopped checking, one new frond unrolls from the crown, pale green and stiff as a folded map. You stand in the doorway with it open and let the cold in, and you don't close it for a long time.