Black ink tattoo of a stylised doll with a patterned headdress and flowers on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Doll with flowers on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised doll-like figure with large eyes and a patterned headdress is tattooed on the inner forearm, framed by rose-like flowers and foliage. The design uses dark outline work with some light shading and fine decorative detail. The tattoo is shown in black ink against pale skin, with a red garment and dark sleeve at the top of the frame.

Forearm Doll Figure Flower Foliage Headdress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margit had worked the lost property hatch at Harrowfield for eleven years and had stopped being surprised by what people forgot. Umbrellas, dentures, a tortoise once, wrapped in a tea towel. So when the doll turned up on the bench beside the ticket barrier, she only sighed and reached for a tag.

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It was a painted wooden thing, no taller than her hand, the kind that opens at the waist to reveal another doll inside, and another inside that. Roses had been painted round its skirt in faded red, and its headdress was patterned like a lace doily someone had ironed too hard. Its eyes were large, mild and a little sly. Margit wrote a label, one wooden doll, roses, found platform four, and put it on the shelf between a bagpipe case and a pair of child's wellingtons.

Next morning it was on the bench again. Then on the 7.12 to Ashby, wedged in the luggage rack, then back on the shelf with its skirt turned to face the wall. The guard swore it hadn't come through his carriage. Margit stopped tagging it and started talking to it, the way she talked to the tortoise's owner when he rang to ask after it.

On the last Friday of the month she opened it, because the rules said she should check for a name. Inside the first doll was a second, smaller, and inside that a scrap of paper folded very small, in a hand she knew from twenty years of delayed-train apologies: Keep it moving. It likes the platforms. She laughed out loud, alone at the hatch, and set the doll back on the bench, where it had wanted to be all along.