Black ink line drawing of three orchids with buds, hanging chains, teardrop pendants and diamond-shaped gems, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orchid sprigs with hanging chains and gems

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of three orchid blooms with buds on thin stems, arranged in a diagonal cluster. Strands of beaded chain with teardrop and faceted gem pendants hang beneath the flowers. The linework is clean and uniform in black ink with no shading or colour, set on a plain sheet of paper.

Botanical Fine line Orchid Flower Bud Chain Bead Teardrop Gem Diamond Stem

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

Sit down, the lot of you, the soup won't wait and nor will I, though my knees would like a word about it. Nobody in this room has heard how the Pennock girl came by her wedding chain, and I'm the only one left who was told it straight. Ada was nineteen the spring the glasshouse at Hollin Lodge came down. The old gardener, Silas Crowe, had kept orchids in there for forty years, pale ones with lips like a fold of silk, and when the glass was taken out he gave her three blooms in a tin of wet moss. He said they'd only open if they were looked at kindly.

Keep reading

She wanted something to hang them from. Her mother had already sold the garnets to pay the rent, so Ada gathered the cut glass drops from the wrecked conservatory chandelier and carried them down to the pawnshop on Cross Street. The pawnbroker, a man with a monocle and a cough, weighed each one on a little brass scale. He gave her a fair price for the beads she'd strung on wire bent with two hairpins. He kept one faceted stone back, saying it was paste, and she never once asked him to prove otherwise.

On the morning of the wedding the orchids had opened, every one, though Silas swore they'd been shut the night before. Ada pinned them to her cuff and let the chain fall from her wrist in long loops, the glass teardrops swinging whenever she lifted her hand. Tom was waiting at the lych gate in his borrowed suit. He looked at her for so long that the vicar had to cough. Then he laughed and said the drops looked like rain that had decided to stay put.

So that's the tale. The chain is still in the drawer at Hollin Cottage, and the last bud is still in Silas's tin, though it hasn't opened since the war. Whether the stone was paste, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it caught the light all the way up the aisle, and that's a better thing for a bride than being real.