In this paper we present a preliminary study of palmprint image synthesis and propose a framework for synthesizing palmprint texture. We first extract principal lines of real palmprints using edge detection and synthesize wrinkles and ridges of palm using patch-based sampling. Then we incorporate principal lines, wrinkles and ridges to obtain the final synthetic image. After that multiple images are derived from each artificial palm to simulate the intra-class images. Our approach can generate large palmprint databases which preserve inter-class and intra-class variations. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic images bear a close resemblance to real palmprints in terms of appearance as well as statistical properties, showing a promising usage in algorithms evaluation and comparison.