Embroidered traditional-style design of a green cactus growing from a skull above a red sun and mesa silhouettes, with the words DON'T BE A PRICK, shown in a wooden frame against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus and skull design in a wooden frame

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A stitched design shows a green cactus growing out of a cream-coloured skull, set in front of a red sun and dark mesa silhouettes with small birds in the sky. Bold dark outlines define the shapes, with flat fills in green, red and brown on a tan background. The words DON'T BE A PRICK sit in block capitals beneath the skull, and the piece is centred in a wooden frame.

Traditional Cactus Skull Sun Desert Bird Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the kettle is nearly warm and the bench has only one splinter. You want the sampler story? Then listen, because I will not tell it twice in this heat.

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Forty years back there was a checkpoint out past Ashby Wells, where the tarmac gave up and the mesas stood about like old men waiting for a bus. A customs man called Hollis Dray worked the booth there. He had one rule: nothing crossed without a reason written on the form. A man hauling a motorbike said it was for his brother. A woman with a box of tinned peaches said they were for a wedding. Hollis wrote everything down and believed about half of it.

Then came a fellow with a framed piece of stitching under his arm, the thread bright as a fire engine. A skull, with a green cactus growing out of its crown and a red sun going down behind the mesas, and two little birds scratched in the sky above. Hollis asked what it was for. The man said it was a warning. Hollis asked what it warned against. The man turned the frame round, and there beneath the skull, in plain black capitals, it said DON'T BE A PRICK. Hollis laughed so hard he had to sit on his stool, and that, my friend, is how the grimmest post in the state became the cheeriest.

He hung that sampler on the booth wall and left it there. When they tore the booth down, the sun had faded to pink, but the skull still held its cactus up as stubborn as ever. Hollis kept the frame, and on the back of the form he wrote a single line: reason accepted.