Full colour sleeve tattoo across the upper arm and forearm showing Totoro, No-Face, soot sprites, a bathhouse and a castle in a green landscape.

Full sleeve with Totoro, No-Face and soot sprites

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Four photographs show a full sleeve tattoo from different angles, covering the upper arm down to the forearm. The scene includes a bathhouse with a masked figure, the large grinning Totoro, black soot sprites, a girl on a broom, and a castle on a hilltop under a blue sky. The shading is smooth and painterly with soft gradients, and the palette is rich, mixing greens, yellows, blues and browns across the composition.

Upper arm Forearm Totoro Soot sprite Castle Forest Mountain Sky

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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

Mind the scuttle, Tom, and stop kicking it, or the sprites will think you're a lazy one and leave the grate cold. Shift up. There. Now listen, because this is the bit your father never believed.

Keep reading

Up in the flue of the old farmhouse, behind the bricks where the chimney bends, live little black things no bigger than a walnut. They have eyes like coal that's been left out in the rain, and they scatter when the fire is lit and cluster when it burns low, rattling like dried peas in a tin. My mother said they were the soot of every winter that ever was, and they only wanted someone kind enough to sweep them out gently.

The winter I was eleven, the snow came over the hill so thick the gate went under, and the sprites began climbing down the chimney in their hundreds. Mam had the bath water heating in the copper house, and steam rose through the slates like mist. Out of that mist walked a great grey creature with a grin wider than the barn door. He held a leaf over his head against the snow and sat down beside the copper as though he'd been invited years back. Nobody had asked him. He hummed, the sprites went quiet, and every one of them slid off the soot and into his fur.

Mam never swept that flue again. Every December she left a bowl of chestnuts on the step, and every morning the bowl was empty and the grate was warm enough to boil an egg. Nobody on this farm has been cold since. Now give me that cup, and I'll tell you about the castle on the hill another night.