Black fine line tattoo of a saguaro cactus between two hatched mountains and a small sun, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus and mountains with a sun

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-needle style black tattoo shows a tall saguaro cactus in the centre, flanked by two mountain ranges and a small solid dot representing the sun. The mountains are outlined and shaded with parallel hatching, while the cactus has a double outline and small spines along its edges. The image is in black and grey, with the design centred on a plain area of skin.

Fine line Upper arm Cactus Mountain Sun Desert

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule had dug its hooves in below the second ridge, and Ada Pryce knew better than to argue with it in that heat. She sat on a flat stone with the survey chain across her knees and the drawing board balanced on her boot, trying to fix the one thing that had bothered her all morning: the saguaro. Its arms bent up like a man hailing a coach, and every one had to be counted before the sheet could go back to the Office in Tucson. Nobody in London would believe a plant could grow that tall. She supposed that was the point of sending a woman with a pen.

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She counted nineteen spines along the trunk before she gave up and started hatching the ranges instead. The sun was a single dot she had pressed too hard with the nib, and it hung above the peaks like a coin somebody had dropped and never gone back for. Her brother Tom used to say she drew everything as if it might be taken away by evening. He had been right, in his way. The survey money ran out in a week, the Office had written to say the northern line would go to a man named Haskett, and the mule had been sold to a freighter from Yuma the day before.

She finished the outline of the cactus with a double stroke, the way the old surveyor had taught her, so the thing would stand up on paper even if nothing else did. Then she folded the sheet twice, weighted it with a red stone, and wedged it into a crack where the rock leaned out of the wind.

When the freighter's dust came over the ridge that evening, the drawing was still there, the sun still pale above the mountains, and the saguaro still standing its ground with its arms raised.