Colour traditional tattoo of a green cactus with red hearts and an orange zigzag-patterned base, on the forearm.

Cactus with hearts on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green cactus with three arms, each marked with a red heart, sits on an orange base decorated with blue, red and yellow zigzag bands and dots. Bold black outlines and solid fills give it a flat, classic look, with light green shading along the cactus body. The tattoo is centred on a forearm against a white paper towel printed with fruit, and other tattoos are partly visible at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oven is ticking as it heats when you unlock the back door at twenty to five, and the cactus is already waiting on the sill above the proving racks, exactly where Nan Dolores left it. Its pot is orange, banded with blue and red zigzags and a row of dots, and it has three arms because a delivery van clipped it in 1987 and nobody had the heart to cut the damaged one off. You flick the light on, brush the flour off the scale, and tell the plant it is too early for anyone to be complaining.

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Tomas comes in at quarter to five with his hood up and the van keys still in his fist. He wants to sell the corner unit, he says, and he wants the cactus gone with the fixtures. You knead the dough harder than you need to. Nan taped a red heart to each arm every February, cut from the backs of old cereal packets, and you have never managed to throw them out, though they curl and fade a little more each year. Tomas watches you slide a tray from the oven and says nothing about the smell, which is his way of conceding.

When the first loaves are cooling, you find the spare heart in the drawer under the till, folded small, the red still bright where the card has survived. You tape it to the top arm without measuring. Tomas leans on the counter and studies it for a long moment before asking whether it's straight. It is not. You tell him it doesn't need to be. Across the road the shutters lift one by one, and the sky over the car park goes the colour of weak tea.

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