Colour tattoo of a teal and purple dragonfly above a shaded purple orchid, set against an orange sun, on the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly and orchid on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A teal and violet dragonfly hovers above a large purple orchid, with a soft orange sun glowing behind them. The wings and orchid petals use smooth shading and highlights, giving a rounded, realistic finish. Vivid purple, teal and orange ink fills the composition, which is photographed close up on a limb against a dark background.

Botanical Realism Forearm Dragonfly Orchid Flower Sun Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchid came to Hallows Gardens in a tin box packed with wet moss, and Mr Tamsin wrote in the ledger that it would not survive the first winter. I was nineteen and had the keys to the east glasshouse, so I carried the box down the gravel myself and didn't spill a crumb of moss. Nobody asked me to. I suppose I wanted to be the one who saved it.

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It flowered in March, a violet so deep it looked wet, its lip speckled like a thrush's egg. Every evening, when the sun came low through the western panes and turned the glass the colour of marmalade, a dragonfly dropped out of the rafters and hung over the bloom. Teal and blue, its wings caught the light like cut glass. Mr Tamsin swore it was the same one every night. He said dragonflies only live a few weeks and that this one was practising for something.

I tried to shoo it out with a folded seed catalogue. It would simply rise, circle the vine and return to its post above the petals, as patient as a churchwarden. In June I stopped trying. I left the vent open, sat on an upturned crate with my tea going cold, and watched the two of them keep their appointment.

The orchid went over in August. I cut the spike and pressed it between the pages of the ledger, under Mr Tamsin's warning about the first winter. The dragonfly never came back, but the sun still sets in the same place, and some evenings I still find myself at the western glass, waiting for a visitor who has no reason to return.