Three small black palm tree tattoos in a fine line style on a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Three palm trees on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Three small palm trees are tattooed on the upper back, close to the shoulder. The fronds are built from short, feathered strokes and the trunks are thin lines that curve and lean at different angles. The ink is black and sits on warm skin, with a blue top strap crossing the frame.

Fine line Botanical Shoulder Palm tree Palm Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Saltmarket since the morning bells, and by noon the stalls sagged under their wet canvas. Old Hesketh sold seed and rope from the corner pitch, and beside the rope he kept three palm saplings in clay pots. Nobody wanted them. His brother had sent them up from a glasshouse in the south as a joke, and they had grown too tall for their pots and too thin for the wind.

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A girl called Ada came under the awning with a basket on her hip and water running off her hood. She asked the price. Hesketh said the trees were not for sale, then said a loaf of bread, since she was already looking at them. She turned the pots slowly in the wet. Each sapling leaned at its own angle. One pointed down toward the harbour, where her father's boat was tied. One bent toward the church spire. The third leaned hard toward the road that climbed out of town. She asked which way they would lean if she set them straight. Hesketh told her they would not stay straight for anyone.

She bought all three for the bread and carried them home along the wall of her yard. By spring the fronds had opened, short and feathered, like hands counting something. In the autumn storms the trunks bent further, and she would stand at the gate each evening to see which way they pointed. When her father's boat came in late, the one leaning toward the harbour had swung round to face the road. Ada took the lantern and walked up that way to meet him, and she did not need to ask which way home was.