Black and grey realism tattoo of orchids with flowing script lettering across the upper arm and shoulder.

Orchids and script on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Several large orchid blooms with shaded petals fill the upper arm and shoulder, with a central bloom in sharp focus. Handwritten script runs down the arm between the flowers, with the word Love the most prominent line. The piece is rendered in soft black and grey shading with high contrast highlights on the petals, and the design wraps around the curve of the arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Orchid Flower Script Handwritten text Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Carrow worked the night shift on Ward Seven for eleven years, and in all that time the orchid on the sill by the lift never once kept a bloom for long. Each spring it opened four or five pale flowers, and each time the day sisters said it had given up. Nell said it was only resting its heart.

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Her husband Tom had left the plant there the winter his mother was on the ward, when he came in every evening with a flask and sat by her bed until the lights dimmed. He told Nell an orchid only flowers when someone watches it closely enough. She took that for a joke, then for a kind of rule. On quiet nights she checked the roots, turned the pot towards the lamp, and talked to it about the weather on the moors and the price of tea.

One March a boy of nine was brought up from the emergency bay with a broken collarbone and nobody to sit with him. Nell pulled a chair to the bed and read him a battered book of rhymes until four in the morning, doing the voices, until he slept. The lines of one old verse stayed in her head: you'll know it's love when the lamp stays lit and the one you love is never far.

When the boy's mother came up at seven, Nell went to the sill. Overnight the orchid had thrown a fresh spike, heavy with pale blooms, the centre flower shaded dark as a bruise. She did not tell the day sister. She only watered it, and it kept flowering through the rest of that year, as if it had decided, like everyone else on the ward, that someone was watching.