Traditional tattoo of a saguaro cactus, barbed wire ring, white flower and desert mesa on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Desert cactus and barbed wire on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A colour tattoo on the forearm shows a desert scene inside a ring of red barbed wire, with a tall saguaro cactus on the right and a smaller cactus in the centre. A white five-petalled flower with a yellow centre and green leaf sits on the left beside a brown mesa, with a red sun above. Bold black outlines frame flat, solid fills and light shading across the sand-coloured background.

Traditional Forearm Cactus Desert Flower Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The saguaro came off the lorry in three pieces, because nobody had measured the doors. Dad Halloran had bought it from a film man in Tucson for forty pounds and a crate of Bells, and it stood eleven feet of hessian and chicken wire in our ring for four seasons before the Ferris wheel went for scrap in Doncaster. Now it leaned against the back of the horsebox in Carlisle with rain running off its arms while I counted the red-painted barbs on the last length of wire.

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The act was Ada's. She rode a grey called Nickel through a hoop of barbed wire strung between two posts, the points painted red so the front row thought it was dangerous, which it was, if you were careless. Every night the painted sun on the back cloth, a red disc over a brown mesa, sat above her at the same height, and every night the crowd cheered like they'd crossed the border on the tickets. Nobody in the seats had ever seen a mesa. Neither had Ada, not properly.

The council wouldn't renew the pitch licence after the autumn, and the wire had rusted through at two of the joins. Ada wanted it kept anyway. She said a ring with nothing to jump through was just a field. So on the last night I cut the strands loose one by one, and she sat on Nickel at the centre with the cut ends hanging like lassoes around her boots, not moving, until the lights went down.

In March I planted the saguaro in my sister's back garden in Brampton, between the dahlias, its hessian arms wrapped in the old red wire. It has not grown a single inch, but the neighbour's cat has started sitting under it in the afternoons, watching the lane as if a show might come round the corner.