Black and grey realism tattoo of orchids and lilies with cursive script wrapping from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Orchids and script quote on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows large orchid and lily blooms with shaded petals, spreading from the shoulder down the upper arm, with leaves and stems at the lower edge. Cursive script runs through the design in dark ink, and the words are only partly readable in this view. The shading is soft and grey-toned, with strong contrast in the script and a pale background of skin.

Realism Botanical Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Orchid Lily Flower Leaves Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The greenhouse on Deck Nine was the only place aboard the Meridian where anything still bloomed without a panel telling it when to. Oona walked its wet aisles at the start of every cycle, counting orchid pots by touch, because the paper labels had gone soft and the ink in the logbook had bled grey in the damp. Most of the crew thought the flowers were a waste of water. Her grandmother had thought otherwise, and had kept a fat notebook of their names tucked inside her overalls.

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The lilies were harder. Hal had kept those beds before his lungs gave out, and above them he had scrawled a line in grease pencil on the bulkhead, half of it rubbed away by someone's sleeve. Oona could still make out you know, the curl of a capital L, in love, and when you fall, the rest lost under a bloom of mould. She copied what she could onto a strip of seed-paper, because the old words seemed to matter more than the water ration, and she had never been sure why.

When the power dipped on the fourteenth cycle and the misting rigs stalled, she had to choose. The orchids could sit on their bark in the dark for days, roots wrapped in moss, but the lily bulbs would rot in a single warm night. She carried the lilies into the cold store one pot at a time, bulbs heavy in her palms, and left the orchids hanging where they were.

The lights came back at dawn. The orchids had held, their pale blooms opened wider than she remembered, and the lilies, sprouting in the cold store, had sent up green points no thicker than thread. Oona tucked the seed-paper under the rim of the nearest pot, where the missing words could stay missing. Some sentences, she decided, were better finished by the plants.