Two black line drawings of potted cacti and succulents on banners reading DON'T BE A PRICK and SUCK IT, a botanical flash design.

Cactus and succulent flash with banner lettering

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two side-by-side panels of outline drawings on paper. The left panel features a cactus with two flowers in a pot above a banner reading DON'T BE A PRICK, and the right panel shows aloe and a succulent in a pot above a banner reading SUCK IT, both set within a circular frame. The work uses uniform black linework with no shading or colour, and the plants are centred with the banners across the lower half of each design.

Botanical Lettering Cactus Succulent Flower Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ambrose kept her greenhouse on the hill above Tollbury, and in it lived a prickly pear with two heads who had been rude to everyone since the spring of the great frost. Nobody could get near him. The sparrows went round. The slugs gave up at the rim of the pot. When the new gardener's boy came up the path with his shears, the cactus told him to mind his own business, and then, because he was that sort of plant, told him again in a louder voice.

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The aloe lived on the next shelf. She was long and patient and had grown up on a windowsill in Lisbon before a sailor carried her north in his coat pocket. She had listened to the cactus shout at the rain for nine years without once shouting back. Her leaves held the cool water he had never had and never asked for. On the night the frost came back, the boy forgot to close the vents, and by morning the whole shelf was furred with ice. The cactus was cracking along one of his ribs like old crockery.

The aloe leaned over the gap between their pots and snapped a leaf from her own side. Slow, clear gel ran out of it onto the split. The cactus said nothing for a long while, which for him was a kind of sulking. Then he grumbled that she was making a fuss over a scratch.

"Don't be a prick," the aloe said, not unkindly. "Suck it up."

The cactus, who had never once in nine years admitted he was wrong, said nothing at all, which she took for thanks.