Predecessors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left their own geological records in the last millennia, though no such written records exist in the last few centuries either on the devastated coast or within its source area. Here we found probable precedent for the 2004 tsunami from stratigraphy on an island 125 km north of Phuket. The western part of the island consists of former beach ridges that rise 1 m above intervenient swales. The 2004 tsunami inundated this beach ridge plain as much as 2 km inland with sandy deposit. Earlier sand sheets underlie the 2004 tsunami deposit in the swales. In a couple of swales 0.5 km from the modern beach, three sand sheets are interbedded with black peat of 2500-2800 years old and the youngest sand sheet was deposited postdating 550-700 years ago. Because the 1881 Car Nicobar earthquake of magnitude 7.9, which provided a tsunami less than a meter in India, lacks significant sand sheet in the swales, tsunami deposits below the 2004 deposit were originated from recurrent full-sized Sumatra-Andaman earthquakes.