Woman in a white sleeveless top showing a colour botanical tattoo on her upper arm, with pink blossoms, a purple orchid and a peacock feather eye among vines.

Botanical upper arm tattoo with peacock feather

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shows a purple orchid, pink blossoms, dark pansy-like flowers and green vines, with a peacock feather eye at the lower end. The linework is clean and the petals are shaded with soft tonal gradations. Colour ink dominates, with pinks, purples and greens set against black outlines and dark foliage, and the arm sits in a softly blurred outdoor background.

Botanical Upper arm Orchid Blossom Flower Vine Peacock feather Pansy Leaves

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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 cooler had sweated through its cardboard by the time the truck reached the Caddon turnoff, and Nell Garrity pulled onto the gravel shoulder to check the orchids before the heat finished them. The purple one had folded its petals inward like a hand closing. She wet a rag from the jerrycan and laid it over the wet paper, then sat on the tailgate and watched the road shimmer toward nothing.

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The peacock feather was tucked into the sun visor where it always was, its eye catching the light whenever the truck jolted. Her father had given it to her the summer he sold the aviary in Tucson, saying a bird that dropped its best feathers for nothing deserved a little looking after. Behind the seat the vines lay coiled in their plastic tub, green and patient, and the pansy seeds rattled in their tin like dry teeth.

She walked the wash below the road with a trowel in one hand and the wilting orchid in the other. Under a palo verde, where the sand had gone grey with old flood silt, a cluster of wild pansies had opened overnight, dark as spilled ink and absurdly alive. Nobody had planted them. Nobody had watered them either. She knelt, dug a hole with her fingers, and set the orchid's roots into the cool dirt beneath the shade.

When she drove on the feather swung gently against the windscreen, the eye turning green, then gold, then green again. Somewhere behind her the first pink blossom was already leaning towards the wash, and the desert did not need rain to prove it had been waiting.