Black and grey tattoo on a thigh showing a seated figure in a sombrero beneath saguaro cacti and a rayed sun, drawn in dotwork within a diamond frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Desert scene with saguaro and sun on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated figure in a wide-brimmed sombrero sits in a desert landscape, flanked by tall saguaro cacti and smaller cacti on the ground. Above, a rayed sun and clouds sit within a triangular outline, and the scene is framed by a diamond shape. The work is rendered in black and grey using stippled dotwork shading for the sand, mountains and sky, with the figure and cacti in denser detail.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Cactus Desert Sun Mountain Figure Cloud Triangle Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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The kettle has just boiled and I have the wedding photographs spread across the kitchen table, so forgive the thumbprints. Your cousin Peter sat out on the churchyard wall through the whole of the speeches, hat tipped down over his eyes and knees pulled up under his chin, exactly like the fellow on your grandfather's desert postcard that lived behind the clock for forty years. Nobody asked him what he was thinking. I suspect he was waiting for the saguaro in that picture to finish growing its arms, which the man in the shop in Phoenix told your grandfather takes most of a century.

The postcard had a sun with rays like a child's drawing of a sun, and a triangle of mountains stuck on the side as if someone had cut the sky to fit a frame. Your grandfather never went to America. He bought it from a rack outside a chemist in Leeds and said he would go one day, and then he didn't, and then it was too late to argue about it.

When the band finally started, Peter came inside, took your Aunt Sheila by the elbow and danced her twice round the hall as if the parquet were hot sand. He stopped by the table with the sugared almonds, looked at the photograph of you at six in your yellow wellingtons, and said, quite seriously, that he had always meant to see the real thing.

I have put the postcard back behind the clock. It is nearly the end of the month, and you still owe me a letter, so write me one that is longer than this.