Orchid Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a orchid tattoo means

Orchids have carried opposite reputations in different places, and a tattoo inherits whichever one its wearer means. The name is the bluntest. Orchis is Greek for testicle, given by Theophrastus to the paired round tubers of Mediterranean ground orchids, and the doctrine of signatures later made those roots a remedy for failing virility. Desire and fertility are the oldest meanings the flower has in the West.

China reads it almost the other way round. The lan, usually a Cymbidium with long grassy leaves and small scented flowers, is one of the Four Gentlemen of Chinese painting beside the plum blossom, bamboo and chrysanthemum, and it stands for the scholar of quiet integrity. A saying attributed to Confucius compares a good person to an orchid growing unseen in a deep valley, fragrant whether or not anybody passes. Worn in that sense, the flower is about character kept in private.

Victorian Britain added rarity and expense. Wild plants were stripped out of forests in South America and Asia to feed a craze for glasshouse orchids, and the rarest changed hands at London auctions for hundreds of guineas. The flower became shorthand for luxury and for a taste that is hard to satisfy, which is the reading that survives in the corsage and the florist's single stem in cellophane.

The plainest modern reading is patience. A potted moth orchid, like the staked one on this page, flowers for months, then sits as a few leaves for most of a year before it blooms again, and plenty of people who wear one mean a person or a recovery that came back after looking finished. The rosary looped round one stem here turns the flower into a memorial, and the hummingbird at another is a real partnership: hummingbirds live only in the Americas, where some orchids depend on them to carry pollen.

Where the design comes from

Orchids are one of the two largest families of flowering plants. The Aztecs flavoured chocolate with the cured pods of a climbing orchid they called tlilxochitl, the black flower, and that is the vanilla drawn with its pods on this page. Planted in the colonies it flowered without fruiting until 1841, when Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion, found a quick way to pollinate it by hand that growers still use. Charles Darwin devoted a book to orchid pollination in 1862 and, from a Madagascar orchid with a nectar spur nearly a foot long, predicted a moth with a tongue to match; one was described in 1903 and named praedicta. Frederick Sander of St Albans meanwhile sent collectors across the tropics to feed the Victorian craze.

Choosing yours

• Name the orchid, because the family covers very different outlines: the flat round moth orchid on an arching stem, the ruffled cattleya with its frilled purple lip, the pouched lady's slipper, a dendrobium cascading along a cane, the vanilla vine. The page has each of them, plus a faceted geometric bloom and one drawn in a single unbroken line.
• Put the lip at the bottom. Most orchid flowers twist half a turn on their stalks as the bud develops, a habit botanists call resupination, so the lip hangs below the rest. Its speckled throat is the first detail lost when the bloom is small, so below about 5 cm let the lip be one clean shape.
• Use the stem. A long spray curving to one side follows a forearm or the ribs, where a single bloom set flat can pass for any flower.

Common questions