Colour traditional tattoo of a green cactus with a pink flower in a teal pot with striped bands, on a forearm surrounded by other tattoos.

Cactus in a striped pot on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green cactus with black spines and a pink five-petalled flower sits in a teal pot decorated with orange stripes and pink and purple triangles. The bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills are typical of traditional tattooing. Other tattoos, including a doughnut, a light bulb and a beaded ring, surround it on the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Cactus Flower Light bulb Bead Feather Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cactus had been bought for a shilling from a barrow at the Michaelmas fair, and by the time the frost came it had refused every kindness the household offered. Mistress Hale watered it on Tuesdays, the way her mother had taught her, and it sulked. The kitchen boy turned its pot to the window each morning, and it sulked harder, bristling its spines at anyone who came near.

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The pot itself was the trouble, the old woman next door said. It was teal glaze cut through with a band of orange and a row of pink and violet triangles, the work of a potter from the hill country who had been paid in cheese and never forgiven. A thing made with that much temper in it, she said, would only grow what it was angry at. So Mistress Hale carried the cactus down to the river on the feast of Saint Brannoc and asked the water what it wanted.

The water wanted nothing. It ran past the stones, bright and unhelpful, while a heron stood in the shallows and looked at her as though she were the one who had been left in a pot. She sat on the wall until the light went orange, then pink, then the colour of a flower that had opened on the cactus's shoulder without anyone noticing. She carried it home under her shawl.

The next morning the whole street came to see it. Nobody could say why the bloom had waited, and nobody asked the cactus, which had gone back to being prickly and cross. Mistress Hale kept the pot on the sill where the sun could reach it, and every Tuesday she told it, plainly, that it was allowed to be tired of being looked at.