Black and grey botanical tattoo of cattails and reeds with stippled shading on the outer upper arm, with a dark sleeve and stone wall behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cattails tattoo on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of several cattails rising from long, curved reeds, with a small patch of water shown at the base. The linework is dark and fairly loose, and the seed heads and leaves are filled with stippled dots and light shading. The design fills the arm diagonally, with the dark sleeve and a stone wall in the background.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Water Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, the chips are going cold and I'm not finished. You'll remember the mere behind the old sports field, the one the caretaker called the pond and we called the Drowning Hole. Nobody swam in it. Nobody went past the fence with the broken sign. But in the summer of 1968 Ray Halloran and Susan Peak went out there with a fishing net and a tin of sardines, and they came back with reeds in their hair and a secret.

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They'd found a rowing boat tangled in the bulrushes, a green thing with no oars, and the cattails stood up around it taller than a man, brown heads like sausages on sticks, bursting with fluff that drifted over the water like snow in June. Ray said the reeds were hiding something. Susan said the reeds were only reeds, that they kept the bank from crumbling and the ducks from starving. She was right, and I think she knew it, and that was the trouble with Susan Peak.

They argued about it all the way to the bus stop. Ray wanted to dig. Susan wanted to leave well alone. Neither of them went back for thirty years, and when they did it was to bury Ray's mother beside the church, and the mere had shrunk to a puddle with a rusted gate.

Here is the bit you've been waiting for. Susan kept one stalk, pressed flat in her geography atlas, and forty years later she slid it across a café table and told him the reeds were never hiding anything. They were only holding the boat up so it wouldn't sink. Ray laughed until the waitress came over. Then he paid for both teas and walked her to the bus, and the two of them have been arguing ever since, which is the happiest thing I know about that wretched pond.