Pink and red orchid tattoos sit on each side of a lower abdomen, with a black and grey horse and script tattoos on the torso.

Orchid tattoos across the lower abdomen

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close crop of a torso showing two matching sprays of pink and red orchids with small buds and stems, one on each side below the navel. A black and grey horse rears on the left side of the abdomen, and handwritten script runs down the right side, with a tattooed sleeve visible at the top left. The orchids use soft shading and colour, while the horse and script are in black ink and grey tones against a plain white brick wall.

Botanical Lettering Other Orchid Flower Bud Horse Script Handwriting Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift along on that barrel, the swing boats won't start till the bell goes, and I've a tale for the ones who came in late. You'll have seen the grey horse on the carousel, the one with its forefeet up as if the Mersey were on fire. That was Ada's horse. She wouldn't ride it, she only painted it, and she painted it rearing because she'd never once seen a horse stand still.

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Ada kept a glasshouse wagon behind the coconut shy. Inside it, under the paraffin lamps, she grew orchids that a sailor brought her from Singapore in a biscuit tin, their roots wrapped in wet moss. Every fair she lost a bloom or two to the frost, and every fair she said the same thing to the earth: you'll flower when you're ready and not a day before. Pink as a lamp shade, the big ones, with a red throat like a cut. Men paid a penny to smell them and walked off looking embarrassed.

The winter the fair stuck in the mud at Wrexham, Ada got a letter in a hand that leaned into the wind. It was written on the back of a playbill and said, in three languages, that the writer had gone back to the sea and would not be coming up the road again. She read it twice, then fed the stove the wrong half. The orchids didn't mind. They kept opening, one sprig and then the next, as if somebody had told them it was spring somewhere else.

So when the mare kicked the barrier that April and went up on her hind legs at the gate, Ada didn't pull her down. She climbed on, rode her once around the ring, and the whole fair saw a woman and a horse with their faces turned to the sky. Nobody ever found the letter's author. Ada kept the stems in water all summer, and each time one flowered she said, to nobody in particular, that it was early.