Small black fine line outline of a cactus on the inner forearm, shown against a cluttered room.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cactus outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of a saguaro-style cactus with two arms sits on the forearm, drawn as a single thin black line with no shading. The cactus stands on a short base line, and the tattoo is centred on the arm with plenty of empty skin around it. The background shows folded clothes, a chest of drawers and a floor, with no colour in the tattoo itself.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis wanted the desert drawn in one line, which I told him was impossible, and he said a surveyor's line was always one line or it was nothing. So I sat at the trestle in the back of the land office in Yuma with a pen dipped in iron gall and tried to make a cactus that would stand without lifting the nib.

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The first two went wrong. One had its arms hanging like wet washing, the other looked like a man waving for a ferry. Eli Varga, the clerk, who fetched our tea and mistrusted anything with a curve, laughed at both and said nobody out here drew things, they simply got lost in them. I thought about that while the flies bumped against the window. Then I thought about my father's orchard in Kent, where he pruned by feel and never once lifted the knife.

The third time I let the line run up from the base, bent at the elbow, rose again, and came back down, and I didn't stop to look until the nib scratched the edge of the paper. It stood. Two arms raised, as if to say here is what the ground can spare. Hollis came in, put on his spectacles and tapped it with one finger. "That'll do," he said, and folded it into the survey with the rest.

Years later I saw that same little cactus stamped on a tin of peaches in a Liverpool grocer's window. Someone had copied it by machine, every edge the same weight, and it looked as though it had never been lost at all.

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