Colour tattoo of a potted succulent arrangement with a patterned teal pot, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Succulents in a patterned pot on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of succulent plants with rounded green and lilac leaves rising from a teal pot decorated with dotted and scroll patterns. Leaves and pot are outlined in clean dark lines, with soft gradient shading and pale highlights on the succulents. Shades of green, teal, lilac and pink fill the composition, which is centred on the pot and spreads upward across the skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Succulent Plant Pot Cactus Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 rain has found the gap in the awning again, so you shift the trays of cuttings two feet to the left and tell yourself the cardboard will hold. Saturday on Hadley Row is never busy in weather like this, which suits you fine. Your only customer so far is a man in a yellow cagoule who wants a plant for his mother's seventieth and cannot choose between the speckled grey pots and the teal one with the dotted scrolls around its belly.

Keep reading

You talk him into the teal. It is hand-thrown by a potter two counties over who signs every base with her thumbprint, and it makes the lilac of the echeveria look almost deliberate, as if the plant had been waiting for that exact colour. He pays in coins, asks whether it needs much sun, and you tell him what Maureen told you when you took over her pitch: the thing that looks sturdiest is the first to rot if you love it too hard.

Maureen's stall is gone now, folded into a van in March, but her returns box is still under your table. Nobody ever brings anything back, so you are surprised to find a small teal pot in it, the same scrolls, a note tucked under the rim in her looping hand. Water when the leaves go soft, not before. Underneath, smaller: they forgive you.

You carry the pot out into the wet and tip a cup of rainwater over the rosettes anyway, because the sky is doing that for free and you want to be sure. Pale green spreads across the lilac edges. Down the street the man in the yellow cagoule is still walking, holding the pot against his chest like something that might spill.