Black and grey traditional tattoo of a cactus with flowers, crystals and a patterned pot, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus and crystals in a pot on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A cactus with three arms and star-shaped marks grows from a pot filled with faceted crystals, with a small flower at the top and a second flower below a zigzag band on the pot. The outlines are bold and the crystals and pot are shaded with stippled dots, with some solid black areas on the cactus. The design is entirely black and grey and is set against a plain pavement and wall.

Traditional Dotwork Botanical Calf Cactus Succulent Crystal Flower Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pot always rode in the van first, wedged between the spare dodgem tyres, because Nan said a cactus travels better than any of us. Every spring it came with us from Hull to Margate to Dunstable, its three arms wrapped in a tea towel on my lap, while the crystals knocked about in the bottom like loose teeth.

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Nan sold the crystals from a card table beside the coconut shy. Amethyst, smoky quartz, a grey lump she swore came from a Derbyshire lead mine. People bought them for their bedrooms and their ex-husbands' cars. The cactus stayed on the table as a sort of advert, and it was the only thing on the field nobody ever tried to haggle down.

The autumn her hip went, we pulled into a field outside Ely with no name and no electric hook-up. Nan couldn't stand, so I ran the table alone. A man in a donkey jacket turned a crystal over in his palm for a long time, then asked whether the cactus was real. I told him it was older than me. He said that was the trouble with real things; they always outlasted the fair.

It flowered on the first hard frost, a cream bloom that split open on the windowsill of the van, something Nan swore it had never done in forty years. I put it in a jam jar on the dashboard, wrapped the pot in its tea towel, and drove on towards the coast with the crystals ticking in the footwell like a clock that had lost its hour.