Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a kokeshi-style doll with green hair holding a parasol, beside a purple blossom, on the upper arm.

Kokeshi doll and blossom on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A kokeshi-style doll with green bobbed hair, a red hair flower and rosy cheeks holds a striped parasol, and a purple blossom with a small sprig sits to its left. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with smooth colour blending in the kimono, face and petals. The design wraps around the outer upper arm against a plain background, with the doll as the dominant focal point.

Neo-trad Upper arm Doll Blossom Flower Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll belonged to Room Nine, and nobody at Sea View House touched it. My mother kept it on the windowsill for thirty years, through the blackout, the summer the sea came over the promenade and the winter the pipes froze solid. It was carved wood, no taller than my hand, with a green fringe of hair, a red flower pinned above one ear and cheeks like windfall apples. It held a striped parasol half-opened, as though she had only just stepped in from the rain.

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The lodger in Room Nine that August was a sign-writer called Frank Calloway, who painted the names on the lifeboats for the council and whistled flat on the stairs. He asked if he could paint the doll. 'Only the parasol,' he said. 'It's the best bit.' I told him no. He laughed and said he'd heard that from a woman who ran off with a pier band in 1938, and then he went back up and shut his door.

On the last Sunday of the season he came down with the doll cupped in his palm. He had repainted the flower in her hair, purple now, the colour of the thistles on the dunes, and he had put a sprig of blossom on her parasol-hand where there had been nothing before. 'It was dull,' he said. 'She needed something going on.' I was ready to shout. Then my mother came through from the kitchen, wiping her hands, and looked at the doll for a long time.

She didn't speak until the tea was poured. Then she took the doll from Frank, set it back on the sill facing the sea and said the parasol had never been for the sun anyway. That night the wind came off the Channel and rattled every sash in the house, and I saw her stand at the window with her hand on the glass, smiling at a painted woman who had finally been allowed to look different.