Traditional colour tattoo of a surfer silhouetted against a sunset with palm trees, a wave and a bottle, framed by a rope border and banners reading Somewhere Over The Rainbow, with hibiscus flowers.

Surfer at sunset with hibiscus and banner

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A surfer carrying a board is silhouetted against a red and orange sunset, with palm trees, birds and a turquoise wave beside them. The scene sits inside a rope-edged oval, with a bottle on the right and two hibiscus flowers with green leaves, plus a curved banner reading SOMEWHERE and OVER THE RAINBOW. Bold black outlines, solid fills and a vivid colour palette define the composition.

Traditional Sunset Palm tree Wave Hibiscus Bottle Banner Rope Bird Ocean Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surfboard reached the Hollin Fell inn an hour before its owner did. It leaned against the porch rail with a cap of snow on its nose, and when I came out with the rock salt there was a man stamping up the track behind it, hood full of white. The bus had left him at the lay-by with a shrug and a warning about the pass. Nobody sensible carries a surfboard up a mountain in January.

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He wanted a room facing west. I told him the nearest sea was two hundred miles off and the only thing west up here was the quarry. He said he only needed the sunset. Then he set a dented glass bottle on my bar, its label long gone, and said his grandmother had kept it full of rum on a Cornish headland, the summer she taught him to stand on a wave. "She said it would get me somewhere warm eventually," he said. "Looks like it's been trying."

That night the wind rattled the sash while he sat by the fire, drawing on a beer mat with a biro that kept running dry. Sometime after two I found his bed empty and the board gone from the rail. The storm had quit. The snow lay blue under a thinning moon, and out on the top field a dark figure stood with the board under one arm, facing east as if the ridge owed him an answer.

The sun came up behind the fell and the whole valley caught fire, red and gold across the drifts, and for one minute the snow looked like a swell rolling in. By the time I reached the gate he had gone, only a line of boot prints heading for the plough road. He had left the bottle on the bar, still full, and the beer mat face up: a palm tree leaning over a wave, and underneath, in capitals, KEEP THE LAMP LIT.