Black and grey botanical tattoo of an orchid sprig with a curved stem, shaded in a realistic style on the upper back near the shoulder.

Orchid sprig on the shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two orchid blooms on a curved stem sits on the upper back, close to the shoulder. The petals and centres are finely shaded in soft greys and near-black, with delicate detail on the inner flower. The pale skin, dark background and cropped view keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Orchid Flower Stem Petal

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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 crate came off the coaster on a wet Tuesday, stencilled with a port you could not pronounce, and you signed for it with the clerk's pen because your own had run dry. Inside, wedged in shavings gone grey with damp, lay a single orchid sprig wrapped in a page of last year's shipping news. Two blooms hung from a stem that bent like a question mark, their petals shaded so softly they looked rubbed in with the side of a pencil.

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The label said Pellow, Quay Street, which was your own address above the glasshouse, but the name had been your father's and he had been dead since March. Mrs Pellow next door shared the surname by marriage and had been fading since the autumn, so you carried the crate up the cobbles in the rain and set it on the potting bench under the north panes, where the salt fog could not reach it. You did not know what orchids wanted. You learned the way the harbour learns the tide, by getting it wrong for a week.

You kept the sprig misted, never drowned, and let the light come in grey off the water. The first bloom opened on a Sunday while the bell at St Ann's rang for evensong. The second took three more weeks, and by then the gulls had stopped fighting over the bins and Mrs Pellow had stopped asking for anyone at all. You carried a photograph of the open flower to her bedside on the back of a fishing permit, and she looked at it for a long time before she smiled and asked whether the boats were in yet.

Nobody has written to correct the label. A third bud has come, pale as a fingernail, and each morning you wipe the condensation from the glass and check it, the way you once checked the tide table before the lifeboat went out. You have stopped trying to name what you are waiting for. You water it at dawn, the bell rings the hour across the water, and the stem leans, very slightly, towards the light.