Traditional colour tattoo of a Venus flytrap in a patterned red and yellow pot, with a MAN EATER banner, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Venus flytrap in a pot with banner

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A Venus flytrap grows from a patterned pot with red, yellow and cream bands, and a ribbon banner across the base reads MAN EATER. A small fly hovers beside the upper leaves. Bold black outlines sit under solid red, green and yellow fills on a skin-toned background.

Traditional Thigh Plant Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first fly went in on a Thursday, and by the Sunday Mrs Pargeter had given the plant a name. She called it Gordon, after the young man at the Chiswick garden centre who had sold it to her with a wink and a sticker that said MAN EATER, as if the shop were in on a joke. She set it on the windowsill of the back bedroom, where the light was good and the flies were plentiful, and she fed it with a pair of tweezers and a steady hand.

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Gordon grew. Each Thursday she lowered a fly towards those red-fringed jaws and watched them snap shut, neat as a purse, and she began to feel she had a companion for the first time since the funeral. The leaves unfurled like the pages of a dictionary, and the pot, with its cream and scarlet bands, looked smaller every week. By August the trap was the width of a dinner plate and the bedroom smelled faintly of pennies.

Her lodger, Desmond, a pleasant man who sold pension plans and hummed hymns in the bath, was the first to notice. He came down one morning with one shoe on and a look of mild puzzlement. 'Your plant's got my brogue,' he said. Mrs Pargeter said nothing. She had seen the lid close, slow and deliberate, across the far side of the sill, and she had seen Desmond's shoelaces go in after it.

The garden centre, when she rang, was no help. 'It's a Venus flytrap, love,' the boy said. 'Read the ribbon.' She put the phone down and fetched a saucer of milk for the tabby from next door, who had taken to sitting on the sill with his eyes half shut. She set it down close to the pot and waited. The leaves, very slowly, began to lean.