Black and grey desert landscape tattoo on the upper arm with saguaro cacti, a campfire with red flames and a scorpion, in a traditional style.

Desert campfire scene on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A wraparound desert landscape covers the upper arm, with saguaro cacti, barrel cacti, yucca, rocky mesas and a scorpion. A campfire sits at the centre, with its flames outlined in red and the logs shaded in grey. Bold black linework and soft grey shading give depth, and faint outlined clouds fade into the top of the design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire had to be fed every hour or the cold came up out of the sand and sat on your chest, and Nell Garrity had been feeding it since the sun dropped behind the mesa the colour of a struck match. She stacked the mesquite in a ring of flat stones and watched the flames lean toward the wash where her brother had ridden at noon after the stray mare and the surveyor's mule. The dust had closed over his track within the hour. A scorpion crept out from under a rock to take the warmth, and she let it be. "Your sort knows how to wait," she told it.

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The night went on without hurry. The barrel cactus turned pale in the moonlight and the saguaros lifted their arms like men who couldn't decide whether to surrender or hail a passing coach. Nell counted them by the hour, the way her father had taught her to count rounds in a rifle magazine, and every time she counted she added another log. Near midnight a hoof struck stone somewhere below the ridge, then nothing, then a hoarse voice calling her name. She didn't answer straight away. She fed the fire higher, so the red edges of the flames would show him where the camp was.

He came up the slope leading the mule, his hat gone and his shirt torn at the shoulder, and the saguaros stood guard over both of them like a row of tired deacons. "You kept it lit," he said, dropping to his knees by the stones. "Every hour," Nell said, and pushed another log into the coals, which hissed and settled and kept on burning.

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