Colour traditional tattoo of a prickly pear cactus with pink flowers, a red sun and the words DON'T TOUCH ME below, on the ribs.

Prickly pear cactus with Don't Touch Me lettering

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A prickly pear cactus with pink flowers and a teal-green flower sits above the words DON'T TOUCH ME, set against a red-pink circle that suggests a sun. The design uses bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in green, pink, red and teal, with little shading. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, and a second, darker tattoo is partly visible at the right edge.

Traditional Ribs Cactus Flower Sun Leaves Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Mary Lesk touched Auntie Vi's cactus, and that was the first rule of the windowsill above the fish market at Brixham. It sat between a tin of Bovril and a brass ship's bell, a prickly pear with pads like green ears, and it had flowered pink every June since before the war. Skipper Tom Garrow said it was the only thing in Devon that had ever told him no and meant it.

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I was seventeen that spring, the new boy, and I did what new boys do. I reached over the sill on the morning we were due out, just to see if the pads were warm from the glass. The first spine went into the ball of my thumb like a splinter with ideas. Then came the fine ones, the glochids, which you cannot see until they are everywhere, so that my hand looked as if it had been dusted with pepper.

Vi came up the steps with a jar of Vaseline and a pair of tweezers and said nothing for a full minute. Then she said, "Well, it's told you." Tom laughed so hard he had to sit down on a creel, and the whole crew laughed with him, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped minding.

We were gone nine days. When we came back the cactus had put out a second bloom, and Vi had set a small teal flower in a saucer beside it, cut from an old enamel plate. The thumb healed with a pale dot where the spine went in. Every time the weather turns I feel it, and I think of her hands working the tweezers without a flinch, and I keep my own hands in my pockets on that windowsill.