Orchids and script on an upper arm
Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo
A black and grey tattoo of orchids and lilies wraps around the upper arm and shoulder, with large blooms shaded in soft greys and fine detail in the flower centres. Cursive lettering runs down the side of the arm, with the words partly visible and set between the flowers. The shading is smooth and the composition fills the arm from shoulder to elbow.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit closer, the lot of you. The rain's only just gone off the gutters and I'm not shouting over the trams. Ask Mrs Okafor's boy if you don't believe me, the one who sweeps the glasshouse behind the Hackney Road station. There were orchids in there, grey as pewter under the lamps, and a gardener called Tobias Vane who kept a ledger of every bloom he'd sold and every one he'd lost.
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Tobias had a habit of scribbling on the backs of seed packets. Snatches of songs, the odd line from a letter he never posted. One February the clock over the station said ten past two and he was still bent over the potting bench when a woman knocked on the glass. She wanted a lily for a funeral and she wanted it by morning. He gave her the cymbidium instead, the one nobody had bought in three years, and while she waited he wrote on the packet: you know you're in love when you can't fall asleep for thinking of the rain.
She laughed at that. She came back every Thursday after, and by spring the packet had gone soft from riding in her coat pocket. Nobody in the city knows what became of them, only that the glasshouse lights stayed on past midnight for a long while, and that a lily with petals gone to pewter has come up in that window every February since.
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