Traditional style colour tattoo of a green cactus in an orange and black patterned pot on the inner forearm, with other tattoos above it.

Cactus in a patterned pot on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green saguaro-style cactus with black outlines and small spines sits in a pot decorated with orange and black zigzag bands and triangles. The bold outlines and flat areas of solid colour are typical of traditional tattooing. Other tattoos, including a green leaved plant, appear above the cactus on the same forearm, which is photographed against a plain pale wall.

Traditional Forearm Cactus Pot Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cactus had outlived three landlords and a damp winter, and Marguerite was not going to leave it on the pavement for the council. The pot was the trouble. It was terracotta, banded in orange and black like a jumper from a jumble sale, and it weighed about as much as a sleeping cat. Nobody on Coronation Road had offered to take it, and her neighbour had shut her door when she asked.

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Her brother Dev arrived at seven in the hatchback, smelling of diesel and the bacon roll he had eaten in a lay-by. He wedged the pot between two boxes of records and said the spines would go straight through the seats. "It's been fine on that windowsill for eleven years," she said. "It has never been asked to ride in a car before."

They drove south with the window cracked. Somewhere past Swindon the cactus began to lean, slowly, the way a man leans at a bus stop, until Dev pulled onto a verge and they stood in the wind holding it upright between them. A lorry roared past and rocked the car. Marguerite laughed until she had to sit down on the kerb with her hand over her mouth.

At the new flat she set it on the sill facing the car park, where the sun came in hard and yellow at four o'clock. The zigzags on the pot caught the light. "Right," said Dev, brushing grit from his palms. "Now it's home." She was not sure he meant the cactus.