Pink orchid tattoo with soft watercolour-style shading along the side of a ribcage, with a black top worn below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink orchid tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cluster of pink orchid blooms with layered petals runs diagonally down the side of the ribcage. The petals use soft, blended shading in several tones of pink, with darker accents at the centres of the flowers and a few fine stems trailing downwards. The skin is shown in a close side view, with a dark top visible at the bottom of the frame and the person's face not in shot.

Botanical Ribs Orchid Flower Petal Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchids came up from Thailand in crates lined with damp moss, and by the time Mr Pryce had cut the wire from the first box, half of them had already dropped a petal onto the potting bench. I was nineteen and paid by the bloom, so I learned quickly which stems were tired and which were only sulking.

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The nursery sat at the end of a lane outside Spalding, a row of glasshouses steaming in February like kettles left on. Pryce kept the moth orchids in the warmest house, where the glass ran with condensation and the air smelt of wet bark. He liked to say a moth orchid would forgive you anything except a cold draught.

One spring a bloom on the old plant at the back bench opened three weeks late, spilling a cluster of pink, layered petals down one side of its arching stem as if it had been painted rather than grown. Pryce wouldn't let me throw it out. He tied a slip of card to the pot reading keep, and when the sale came he sold the whole house but that one plant, which he handed me in a plastic tub with the card still on.

I carried it home on the bus, balancing it on my knees, the petals brushing my wrist at every corner. Pryce had been right about the draughts. I kept the window shut from October to May, and every February it bloomed again, a little pinker than before, as though it had been practising.