Black linework tattoo of a cactus in a patterned pot on the inner upper arm, with a black top and denim visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus in a patterned pot on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single cactus with three arms grows from a pot decorated with a geometric band of diagonal and cross-hatched lines. The cactus is outlined in black with fine ribbed lines and small dotted spines, and the pot is shaded with solid black and open line work. The design is in black ink only and sits centrally on the upper arm against plain skin, with a dark top and denim jeans visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Cactus Plant Pot Geometric pattern

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite, the cactus is still alive, which I consider a minor miracle given that I have been watering it with the dregs of my tea and a sense of optimism. You will remember the one from the market at Tucson, the squat pot with the zigzag band the colour of old pennies. The man who sold it said it was three hundred years old and I said that was impossible for a thing that size, and he said the plant didn't care what I believed about it.

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I have moved it four times since the spring. It sulked in the hallway, then sulked by the radiator, then sat in the bath for a week while the landlady complained about the drip. Yesterday I finally put it on the sill facing the car park, where the sun comes in flat at four o'clock and makes the whole street look like a photograph of itself. It has grown a new arm. Three arms now, one of them bent up like someone hailing a bus that has already left.

Which is why I am writing. The bus driver on the Route 9 today was the same man who sold me the pot, or his brother, or a stranger with the same wide hat. He nodded at me as if we had an arrangement. I nodded back, out of politeness. Come out to the coast in June and bring your sketchbook. I want you to draw the thing properly, the ribs and the little dotted spines, before it decides to become something else entirely. Your loving, slightly defeated friend, Hester.