Colour realism tattoo of pink orchid blooms with dark stems running down the side of the ribs and torso.

Pink orchids down the side of a torso

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Several pink phalaenopsis orchids are tattooed in a column along the side of the torso, with dark sweeping stems linking the blooms. The petals are shaded with soft gradients from pale pink to deep magenta, with highlights that give a glossy, three-dimensional look. Warm skin tones and blue denim at the bottom edge frame the design against a plain background.

Realism Botanical Ribs Orchid Flower Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchids lived on the kitchen sill of number nine Quay Row, where the glass caught whatever heat the range gave up. My mother kept six of them in pots that had once held pickled onions, and she talked to them the way other women talked to the wireless. When the fleet came in on a Tuesday with a thin catch, she would stand at the sink with her hands in the washing-up water and tell the flowers what the Marigold had brought home, as though they were partners in the books.

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The first plant my father ever gave her had come off a stall in Grimsby, wrapped in a sheet of the Fishing News. He had paid too much and never once admitted it. The stems arched over the rim of the pot like something reaching for water. She said they looked like the wake behind a boat at dusk, dark and sweeping, and then laughed at herself for saying it.

The winter the Marigold failed to come round the breakwater on her expected night, the orchids kept flowering. I could not understand it. I watered them because she had told me to, and I counted the blooms each morning, and there were always more, pink and glossy, the petals fading to pale at the edges like the sky over the lighthouse. Once I cut a spent stem and walked it down to the harbour wall and dropped it on the swell, and I watched the tide carry it out past the buoys until I could not see it any more.

The boat came in three weeks late, with a fresh scrape along her hull and a crew who would not meet anyone's eye. My father came up the Row without his cap, which was how I knew. He stood at the window a long time before he came in. Then he touched a petal with one finger. It was cool and waxy, and he said nothing, which was how he said most things, and I understood that the flowers had been counting the days for both of us.