Black and grey fine line and dotwork cactus in a pot with small flowers, on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus in a pot on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cactus in a terracotta-style pot, with several rounded segments and two small flowers at the top, is tattooed on the inner upper arm. The outlines are fine and delicate, with stippled dotwork shading on the pot and spines marked with small dots. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and sits centrally against a plain pale background, with a grey t-shirt sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Cactus Plant Flower Succulent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the flour has settled on the zinc bench, you have already decided the cactus on the back sill will have to go. Mrs Okafor's nephew brought it in a terracotta pot in March, and it has spent the winter sulking under the extractor fan, two stubby buds on top as if it means to flower out of spite. You tell yourself this every morning at four, when the ovens are still ticking up to heat and the street outside is the colour of wet slate.

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Then Dilys comes in through the back with her hair full of drizzle, and she sees you looking at it. "Don't you dare," she says. "That plant has outlived three managers."

You make the first tins of loaves while she argues, and the argument goes the way they always do, with you giving up on the cactus and her winning the point about the rye. Somewhere between the scoring and the first oven door swinging open, the sky over the car park turns from slate to pewter, and the light finds the windowsill, where the spines have been catching the lamp all along, dozens of them, each one a small dot of shadow.

By six the buds have opened. Two flowers, pale and absurd, the colour of the first crust off the tray. Dilys sets a cup of tea beside the pot without looking at either of you, and says nothing about it, and neither do you.