Colour traditional tattoo of a green succulent in a terracotta pot with the words What up, succa? above and below, shown in two close photos on skin.

Succulent in pot with 'What up, succa?' lettering

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold succulent with green and purple leaves sits in a brown pot decorated with a red, teal and cream zigzag band, framed by the words WHAT UP, above and SUCCA? below. The thick black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with light shading on the leaves. The two photos show the same design from slightly different angles and distances, with the subject centred and filling most of each frame.

Traditional Lettering Other Succulent Plant Text Zigzag Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The succulent rode shotgun for three hundred miles, its terracotta pot wedged between the seat and the cracked dashboard, its fat green leaves tipped toward the windscreen as if it had paid good money for the view. You had bought it from a petrol station at Saltpan Junction for nine dollars and a promise you would not kill it, and so far you had kept your side. The road ran dead straight across the flats, heat bending the tarmac into lakes that were never there.

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Somewhere past a rusted cattle grid the back tyre gave up with a crack like a rifle shot, and you spent an hour wrestling the jack while the sun leaned on your neck. A lorry crawled up from the south and stopped beside you. A man climbed down wearing a sweat-stained cap and the grin of someone who had waited his whole life to meet a stranger. He leaned into your open window, looked straight past you at the plant, and said, "What up, succa?" You laughed so hard you had to sit down on the hot sill of the door.

He changed the wheel faster than you could have found the spare, talking the whole time about his aunt in Needles, who kept a hundred pots along her porch rail and spoke to every one of them by name. Succulents, he said, hoard their water in those thick leaves and sulk for weeks before they let you know they are thirsty. When he drove off he left a scrap of cardboard on the bonnet with a phone number scrawled across it and the words CALL ME, SUCCA.

By the time the neon of the next town rose out of the haze, the plant had shifted in its pot to face the western light, its purple-tipped leaves gone gold at the edges. You stuck the cardboard to the dashboard with a strip of tape, turned the radio off, and said the words back to the empty road, just to see how they sounded out here.