Black fine line cactus tattoo with a small line of text below it on an upper arm, photographed in front of prickly pear cacti.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cactus tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare upper arm bearing a black cactus tattoo with a tall branching column and two rounded pads, with a small pot or base shape at the bottom. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. A small line of text sits lower down on the arm, and the cacti in the background are green and out of focus.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Cactus Succulent Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Bexhill believed the cactus had come all the way from Arizona in a duffel bag, least of all the customs officer at Heathrow, who had turned the bag out onto a steel table and found a sock, two paperbacks and a plant pot wrapped in last week's local paper. Gordon Pryce told the story every Christmas, and every year the arm got longer. By his telling, the saguaro was four foot tall, then six, then tall enough to need a stepladder for the top branch.

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His sister Maureen kept it alive through the winter of 1981 on a windowsill above the chip shop, watering it on Sundays with a teaspoon because the leaflet said so. She never fully trusted the leaflet. She trusted the spines, which she called the only honest thing in the house, and she counted them each Sunday the way other women counted rosary beads.

The little cluster of prickly pear pads at the base never grew past three. Gordon thought it was a cheat, a pair of cuttings Maureen had stuck in to make the pot look full. Maureen said they were the wives, and that the big one had always been the sort to sulk if left on its own.

When Maureen died, the cactus went to the greenhouse at the bottom of Gordon's garden, where the frost came in each February like a debt collector. It did not flower for forty years. Then one June morning in a year without a drop of rain, a single white bloom opened at the crown of the tallest arm, and Gordon sat on an upturned crate for an hour with his tea going cold, not wanting to be the first to tell anybody.