Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a bird skull with a long beak, surrounded by orchids and leaves, on the inner forearm.

Bird skull with orchids on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bird skull with a long, tapering beak sits at the centre of the design, framed by orchid blooms and slender leaves that spread across the arm. The linework is fine and sketchy with loose overlapping strokes, and shading uses dark solid areas and dotwork texture. The composition runs diagonally along the forearm, with the skull and flowers balanced against open leaf sprays.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Skull Beak Orchid Flower Leaves Botanical

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

You find the skull in the orchid house on a Tuesday, wedged behind a stack of terracotta pots where nobody has swept since the glasshouse was reglazed. The beak is long and tapering, bleached the colour of weak tea, and someone has tucked a spray of leaves through the eye socket as if it were a buttonhole. Mr Tennant's ledger is still on the bench, its last entry dated three weeks before the stroke that put him in the home at Ardwick. Underneath, in his cramped capitals: DO NOT MOVE THE CURLEW.

Keep reading

You move it anyway, because the same ledger says the Cattleya by the north pane has not flowered in nine years, and you are the one who has to explain that to the Parks Committee. You carry the skull out in both hands, as if it might still be warm, and set it on the potting bench where the light comes in grey and even. The orchids here are fussy. They want bark and air, not soil, and they sulk if you drown them. Tennant used to say they were the only honest plants he knew, because they told you exactly what they thought of you by dropping every bud the week you got it wrong.

For a fortnight nothing happens. You water on the proper days, mist the roots, and learn to read the silver tips of new growth through the clear pots. Then, on the morning of the committee meeting, the Cattleya throws up a single spike, pale and stiff as a heron's neck, and by six o'clock three blooms are open, lipped and freckled, held over the bench like a hand raised to ask a question.

You do not go to the meeting. You take the secateurs, cut the best flower, and set it in the bird's empty socket, where it sits as though it has always belonged there. Then you ring Ardwick and ask whether Mr Tennant would like to see something he has been waiting nine years to see.