Succulent tattoo on upper arm

A potter named Ilse had a cart with three wheels and a sorrow in every spoke. Her husband had gone over the water to Crete and not come back, and each evening she sat on the harbour wall counting gulls. On the cart she kept a clay pot of succulent, pale as sea glass, its leaves stacked like the petals of a late lily and edged in blush where the sun reached them. Nobody in the village had seen a plant that held its water so stubbornly. They said it was a sorcerer's cutting.

One night a stranger came up the road with a sack of salt on his shoulder and asked for shelter. He ate her bread, looked long at the pot, and laughed the way men laugh when weather has lied to them. 'That one drinks nothing and gives everything back,' he said. 'Like your husband, I should think.' Ilse flung the salt into the sea and the stranger out of her door, and the pot sat on the sill all winter, unwatered and untended.

In spring the leaves had opened wider, pink at the tips, and a fat green bud stood up from the middle like a candle. Ilse broke off one leaf to press on a blister and found it cool and full of patience. She planted the rest along the wall, and when a man with a cap in his hands finally walked up the road, he found her among rows of them, rose and grey-green, every leaf holding a little of the sea.