Realistic grey orchid vine with buds and a small red script quote across a person's upper back by the shoulder blade.

Orchid vine and script on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A vine of orchids and buds curves from the top of the shoulder blade down and across the upper back, with the blooms shaded in soft grey tones. A small red script line reading "What treasure waits within Your scars" sits to the right of the vine. The composition is set against plain skin with warm lighting.

Botanical Realism Lettering Back Orchid Flower Bud Stem Vine Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pear tree at the top of Hollin orchard had been split by lightning the summer before Tamsin was born, and every autumn since, its wood had wept a grey sap down the trunk like a letter sealed badly. Her mother said to leave it alone. Nobody in the village could remember who had planted the orchids that came up the bark that August, a vine of them climbing from the roots and looping through the broken limbs, pale blooms with dark freckled throats opening one after another as if they had been waiting. The vicar said they were the wrong soil for orchids. The carter said they were the wrong sort of luck. Tamsin said nothing and watched them from the gate.

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In the last week of August she borrowed her uncle's grafting knife and climbed the tree. The vine came away easily under her fingers, but the crack in the trunk was dry and dark and smelled of old rain. She worked the bark back from the scar, slowly, the way her grandmother had taught her to lift a graft, until she found a tin box the size of a hand wedged in the hollow. Inside was a folded paper in her grandmother's cramped hand. It read: What treasure waits within your scars. Under it lay a dried orchid, its colour still faintly purple, and a packet of seed no bigger than dust.

She did not tell her mother about the box. She sat on the wall that evening and turned the paper over and over until the light went. The wood under the scar, when she looked again the next morning, was pale and sound, the tree having closed itself around the wound the way a hand closes around a stone.

By September the blooms were fully open, and the windfalls rotted unpicked in the grass while the orchids climbed higher, and Tamsin left the knife in the shed.