Black and grey circular tattoo of a desert scene with a saguaro cactus, mountains and a rising sun, done in stippled shading on a forearm.

Desert landscape in a circle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular desert landscape sits on the forearm, showing a tall saguaro cactus on the left, smaller cacti and shrubs in the foreground, and dark mountains on the right. A sun with radiating rays rises between the hills, and a soft cloud or sky shape fills the upper part of the circle. The work is built from fine stippled dots and light shading in black and grey, with the sky left mostly pale.

Dotwork Forearm Desert Cactus Mountain Sun Landscape Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the tray, love, it's still warm enough to take the skin off your knuckles. Sit there by the oven where Dessie used to sit, and I'll tell you about the morning Walter Pell came back from the desert with a sack of saguaro seed and no hat.

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He'd gone out to the Sonoran flats the year the mill closed, working for a man who sold cattle feed by the wagonload. Walter said the cacti stood up out of the ground like men who'd been told to wait and had forgotten what for. He said the mountains went purple in the afternoon and black by six, and that the sun came up over them each morning so slow and so fierce that its rays fanned out across the scrub like the spokes of a cart wheel, and every one of them meant the night was finally over.

Nobody believed him. We thought the heat had got into his head. So he drew it for us on the back of a bread bill: a circle, a saguaro on the left, dots for the shrubs, dark hills on the right, and the sun pushing up between them. Then he sat where you're sitting and cried into a cob loaf, because the drawing was small and the country was not.

The bell over the door rang before the shutters went up that morning, and it was only the first grey light coming through the glass. I took his bill from my apron and laid it flat on the counter, circle up. Walter always said you could keep a whole desert in something the size of a saucer if you were patient enough with your dots. Get the kettle on, love. The sun's about to come up on somebody's bit of it.