Colour tattoo of a kokeshi doll in a teal kimono with pink cherry blossoms on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokeshi doll and blossoms on upper back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A kokeshi doll with a black bob haircut and closed eyes sits at the centre of the design, wearing a teal kimono patterned with small pink petals. Pink cherry blossom sprays and a single falling petal surround the doll at its base. The soft outlines and gentle shading give the figure a rounded, illustrative look against the pale skin of the upper back.

Japanese Back Cherry blossom Kimono Petal Bob haircut

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll was carved from a cherry branch that had come down in the spring storm, and the turner left the bark on the underside so the grain would show when it was painted. He gave it to his wife's cousin, Tomé, who was signing onto a rice ship bound for the far southern islands and would be gone two winters. Take her, he said. She'll keep your eyes on the way home.

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The ship was called the Kiyo Maru and it rolled in every sea. Tomé kept the doll tied in a square of cloth inside his sleeping mat. On the twelfth night out a wave came over the rail and soaked the bundle, and when he unwrapped it the teal silk on the doll's kimono had run a little, so that the petals looked as though they were drifting. He sat up all night with a candle and a fine brush, dabbing the colour back where it had faded, and by morning the doll looked as if she had only been waiting.

The ship came home in the cherry month. The first thing the cousin's wife saw from the harbour wall was a thin figure at the rail, and then the flutter of a sleeve. Tomé stepped onto the stones with the doll held out in his palm like something hatched. She is yours now, he said, and I owe you two winters of my pay for the loan of her. Mariko laughed and said the doll had earned her keep. Then she stopped laughing, because a single pink petal had dropped from the doll's hem onto the wet stones, and neither of them could say where it had come from.