Colour traditional tattoo of a green cactus with red flowers and a patterned pot on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus in patterned pot on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A green saguaro-style cactus rises from a black pot decorated with orange, yellow and red zigzag bands. Red five-petalled flowers with green leaves surround the pot and sit on either side of the cactus. Bold black outlines, solid fills and small black dashes for the spines give a clear, flat traditional look against a blue background.

Traditional Upper arm Cactus Flower Pot Leaves Zigzag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marnie,

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The rain has been coming sideways across the market since seven, so I have pulled the tarp tight over the trestles and moved the good pots under the gazebo. Mr Okafor from the fishmonger's has been round twice to ask whether the big cactus is for sale yet. I told him it's for the window in the back room, which is the truth, though I've been looking at it all morning the way you look at a dog you know you'll have to give away.

You'll remember the pot. I bought it off a woman in Oaxaca who sold the lot from a blanket, and she wrapped it in a page of newspaper I couldn't read, then in another, then in a carrier bag. Black clay, with bands of orange and yellow and red zigzags round the top like the stitching on a good coat. Nobody here looks at the pot first. They see the cactus, then the flowers, and only then do they look down and notice how the zigzags march round.

On Friday a boy of about nine stood in the wet with his mum and asked if the spikes were real. I said they were, and he went quiet and then asked if the cactus would die in the rain. I said a saguaro would sooner drown than rot in a British February, which made him laugh, and his mum bought the small one with the red flower, the one that looks as if it's been painted on.

I'm taking the big one home tonight. I'll put it on the sill where the light comes in flat over the roofs, and I'll water it once a month like the card says. Come up at Easter and tell me it's still standing.

Love, Jo