Black and grey realism tattoo of orchids and cursive script across the shoulder and upper arm.

Black and grey orchids with script on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large sleeve-style tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, featuring several orchid blooms with shaded petals, buds and leaves. Cursive script runs between the flowers, with the words "You know" and "in Love" among the partly legible lines. The work is rendered in black and grey with soft shading and high contrast highlights, and the flowers dominate the composition while the lettering wraps around them.

Realism Botanical Lettering Shoulder Upper arm Orchid Flower Bud Leaf Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every February Mrs Pilling came into the glasshouses before the boilers were lit, when the panes were still grey with sleet and the orchids sat in their pots like people waiting for a bus. She had kept the stock at Hollins Nursery for thirty-one years and could tell a moth orchid from a cymbidium by the sound a leaf made under her thumb. That morning she found the lad from the packing shed kneeling behind the potting benches, reading a letter he thought nobody could see.

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"You'll have it creased," she said. He folded it fast, but not fast enough. It was from a girl in Carlisle who had gone off to nursing college and only wrote at Christmas now. Some lines were pressed hard into the paper, as if the pen had been angry: you know I was never any good at saying it, and when you fall, I'll be the one... The rest had gone to water at one corner. Mrs Pilling held out her hand, read it through the bottom of her glasses, and gave it back without a word about spelling.

"Plenty of folk fall," she said, lifting a spike of pale blooms and turning the pot so the light caught the shaded petals. "Orchids don't waste their energy on that. They sulk through the cold, then they bloom when they've decided to. Give her cool nights and she'll set buds by March." She snapped a healthy keiki off the parent stem and pressed it into his palm. "Pot that up. Don't fuss."

He potted it in a chipped saucer that evening and kept it on the sill above his bed. By April the first flower had opened, lipped and pale, and he sat with his back to the wall and wrote a reply on the inside of a seed packet, three words, which he never sent, and which he kept folded in the sill beside the pot.