Small colour tattoo of a prickly pear cactus with pink flowers on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Prickly pear cactus on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small prickly pear cactus with three green pads and two pink flowers sits on the inner forearm, close to the wrist. The outlines are fine and soft, and the pads are filled with light green and yellow-green shading that fades toward the edges. The design is centred on pale skin against a blurred background, with a few tiny dots suggesting spines.

Fine line Forearm Cactus Flower Succulent Plant

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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

The bargeman Tobias Reeve bought the cactus from a market stall in Stourport for a penny, because the woman selling it said it would not last a month in English rain. He set it in a clay pot on the cabin roof, between the coal sack and the chimney, and it sat there through the wet autumn looking faintly insulted by the weather.

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All that winter the boat went up and down the Trent and the Severn with the pot rattling against the chimney at every lock. The keepers asked what it was. A prickly pear, Tobias said, from a country where the sun did not go behind the hills. They laughed at him. The pads stayed plump all the same, three of them, green at the heart and paler at the edges where the cold got in and waited.

In May, when the water was warm enough to smell of weed, two pink flowers opened on the top pad. The lock keeper's daughter at Stoke Bruerne came down to the towpath to look. That's a foolish thing to carry on a boat, she said. Tobias agreed that it was foolish, and kept it anyway.

He kept it through the winters that followed. When he finally tied the boat up for good, the pot went to the lock keeper's daughter, who set it on her windowsill facing south, where the glass held the heat, and where it still flowers each May for anyone who knows to look.