Black and grey realism tattoo of orchids and cursive script including the word Love, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Orchids and script on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Large black and grey tattoo of several orchid blooms, with buds and leaves, wrapping around the shoulder and upper arm. Cursive script runs through the design, with the word Love clearly visible among partly shown lines of text. The orchids are shaded with soft greys and fine highlights, and the lettering sits in the gaps between the flowers.

Realism Lettering Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Orchid Flower Script Love Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the lane above Caddon Fell by four o'clock, and Margaret Tully counted the rooms twice before she admitted nobody else was coming. The Plough had eleven beds and one guest, a cartographer called Ivo Benn, who had walked in with frost in his eyebrows and asked whether the kitchen kept anything hot after nine. She gave him the end of the stew and a glass of the sloe gin her husband had labelled in his neat capitals.

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In the scullery, past the boot rack, the orchids lived in a row of clay pots under a lean-to of glass. Her husband had grown them from a seedling a travelling salesman left as payment for a bed in 1971, and the blooms had outlasted him by six winters. Ivo found her there at ten, hands in the wet compost, and asked why anyone would keep flowers that wanted so much fuss. She said the fuss was the point, and took the letter from her apron pocket to prove it.

It was written in the slanted cursive he used for everything, the ink gone grey with damp. He had sent it the winter he went down to Carlisle to sell the cut blooms and never came back up the fell. Most of the lines had bled away over the years, but Love still stood out across the top of the page, and beneath it a sentence about how you know a thing is true when you stop checking whether it is.

Ivo read it twice without speaking. Then he took the trowel from her and set a new cutting in the pot beside the old one. By morning the road was open and he was gone, but on the mantel he had left a map of the lane with one bend circled in pencil, and beside it three words in careful script: I will come back.