Colour tattoo of a large-eyed cartoon geisha doll with black hair, red kimono and red bow in a Japanese-inspired style on a calf.

Cartoon geisha doll on a lower leg

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large-eyed cartoon geisha doll with glossy black hair, a red comb and hair ornaments, and a red bow, wearing a patterned red kimono with a red obi. The face is pale blue-tinted with soft shading and a small yellow beak-like mark, and the hair has smooth blue-black highlights. Bold red and blue ink dominates, with the figure set against plain skin and the design cropped at the bottom edge.

Japanese Calf Geisha Doll Kimono Hair ornament Bow

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll-maker of Tsuruga had carved forty figures that spring, and every one came out with the same sorrowful face, so when the baker's son came asking for a bride doll for his intended, the old man shook his head and took down the block of cherry wood he had been saving. He worked through the first snow. He did not paint the eyes until the last night, because his hand was unsteady and he did not trust it.

Keep reading

The bride was delivered on the Sunday, wrapped in red silk, with a lacquered comb in her black hair and a red bow tied at one temple the way the women of the valley wore them. The baker's son carried her up the hill himself. At the gate the intended waited with her mother and a cousin who laughed at everything, and when the silk came away the cousin said the doll looked like a sparrow that had been sat on.

Nobody laughed after that, because the doll winked. The old man had not painted a wink. He swore on his knife that he had not. The baker's son turned her face to the wall, and by morning she was facing the room again with one eye shut, pleased with herself.

The couple kept her on the shelf by the door anyway, since a doll that winks at a bad argument is hard to shout at. They quarrelled less than their neighbours. When the cousin came to visit and called her a sparrow, she winked at him, and he went quiet and sat down.