Colour botanical tattoo of purple flowers, small blue blossoms and green leaves across a shoulder and onto the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flowers and leaves on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cluster of purple orchid-like flowers with green leaves, small blue blossoms, hanging buds and a red flower spreads across the shoulder and curves onto the upper arm. Dark outlines and smooth colour fills define the petals and foliage, with soft shading on the larger blooms. The skin fills the foreground and the tattoo runs diagonally against a dark, blurred background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Orchid Blue flower Red flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchids travelled in the back of the lorry wrapped in wet newspaper, and by the third stop in Shrewsbury they always looked like they had given up. My uncle Dennis said that was the trouble with anything that lived on the road. You had to keep it in the dark, then ask it to be pretty for strangers in a field.

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I had charge of the flower tent that summer, because my cousin had run off with a dodgem driver from Hull. Every morning I unpacked the crates, snipped the browned tips off the forget-me-nots, and misted the little red blooms that Dennis insisted on calling carnations, though nobody in Kent had ever seen one that colour. The purple orchids I kept apart on a shelf above the change box, because they were the only thing on the lorry that cost more than the lorry.

On the last night in Ludlow the generator quit at half past nine, and the whole field went black except for the big wheel's lights swinging over the car park. I took a torch to the orchids and found one spike had opened in the dark, two petals flat and wet as if they had been painted that minute. I didn't tell Dennis. I packed it into an old tobacco tin with a damp rag and carried it across the field to the bus stop, where a woman in a green anorak was waiting for the last coach.

She didn't ask what it was. She only said it looked like it had come a long way, and took the tin in both hands.