Colour tattoo on a thigh of pink and purple lady's slipper orchids and green leaves in front of a red and blue sunset, all inside a black state outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orchids and sunset in a state outline on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a black-outlined state shape filled with a painterly sunset of red, pink, blue and teal sky with dark streaks of cloud. In front sit shaded white and grey lady's slipper orchids with purple pouches, yellow petals and green leaves. The shading is soft and blended, and the flowers fill the lower half of the composition while the sky fills the upper part.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The line ran dead straight for nine miles, then the bog made us bend it. Hartley swore at the chain, I swore at the midges, and by the third week we had stopped pretending the ground would hold still for us. On the fourth evening the sky over the fen went the colour of a boiled sweet, red bleeding into teal, and Hartley stood with the staff leaning against his shoulder and said nothing at all, which in two years I had never known him do.

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We walked back along the drainage ditch with the theodolite case knocking against my knee. Among the sedge, in patches the size of hearthrugs, grew the lady's slippers, white and grey as old linen, their purple pouches hanging like coin purses and their yellow lips bent down as if they had been told a secret. Hartley crouched and would not let me pick one. He said the county paid us to mark where things ended, not to take what grew past the mark.

The next morning we drew the boundary straight through the middle of the bog, a clean ink line on the sheet, and the orchids lay on the wrong side of it. Hartley signed the plan and never looked at it again. Every spring after, when the sheet came back from the office with corrections in red, I found the pencil dot we had left at the bog edge had sunk into a small wet hollow, and from it, if you bent close enough, a pale slipper flower opened its purple pouch to the sky.

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