Small solid black palm tree tattoo on the upper back of a woman wearing a black bikini top, photographed in bright sunlight.

Small palm tree tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black palm tree sits on the right side of the upper back, with a fan of fronds on a slender, slightly curved trunk. The design is a solid silhouette with no interior detail, rendered in black ink. The bare, sunlit back and black bikini straps frame the tattoo against a pale wall and green foliage.

Botanical Back Palm tree Palm Silhouette Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen of Porthcaddy said the palm had come off a Lisbon boat in the hold of a salt barrel, and nobody had planted it, so nobody could say who it belonged to. It grew anyway, out of a crack in the harbour wall, leaning east as if it wanted to be somewhere warmer. The old women called it a lie the sea had told, because palms did not grow in Cornwall, and the young men called it a dare.

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Mabel Treloar, who mended nets on the quay, went out to it every morning before the tide turned. She brought a bucket of brackish water up from the steps and poured it at the root and said nothing, which was the custom of the harbour for things that might not last. Her husband had sailed with the Atlantic fleet and not come back, and she had decided that a tree with no business in the cold was the nearest thing to a letter she would ever get.

The autumn the storms came in off the bay, the wall split along its whole length and the boats knocked against each other until morning. Mabel stayed on the quay with a lantern. When the light came grey and clean, the palm was still standing, its fronds torn to ribs and its trunk bent a single degree further east, as if it had leaned into the wind to keep the wall from falling.

Nobody in Porthcaddy cut it down after that. The children learned to climb its trunk, the fishermen tied their lines to it on a Sunday, and Mabel kept pouring her bucket. When people asked why the tree mattered, she said it had held the harbour up for a night, and that was reason enough.