Colour tattoo of a kokeshi-style doll in a red kimono surrounded by pink cherry blossoms, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokeshi doll and cherry blossoms on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A kokeshi-style doll with a black bob fringe, rosy cheeks and closed smiling eyes wears a red kimono with white patterns. Pink cherry blossoms with green leaves surround the figure, and a few loose petals drift around the edges. Bold black outlines and smooth colour fills cover the upper arm, and the wearer's face is cropped out of frame.

Japanese Upper arm Cherry blossom Kimono Petal Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll had ridden on the dashboard since the last town with a proper name, its painted fringe bleached a little greyer each day under the windscreen. Marguerite kept meaning to take it down. Every morning she told herself the glue at its neck was too old to trust over the bumps, and every morning she propped it back against the glovebox, facing the road like a passenger with opinions. Her grandmother had carried it out of a village in the north where the cherry trees were older than the houses, and she had never once let it sit face down.

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The road south out of Calvary Flats ran straight for ninety miles without a bend. By the third hour the heat had turned the tarmac to a silver sheet, and the only things moving were the heat shimmer and a tumbleweed that seemed to be following her. She was thinking about nothing at all when she saw the tree, a single cherry standing by a motel with no sign and no windows, its branches so pink against the scrub that she slowed without deciding to.

She stood beneath it with the engine ticking behind her. The wind came up from the flats and shook loose a fall of petals that skated across the cracked ground like something spilled from a kimono sleeve. She broke off a small branch, the way her grandmother used to, and carried it back to the car without quite knowing why.

Back on the road, she tucked the sprig behind the doll's black fringe. The painted eyes stayed closed, the cheeks stayed round, and the little red robe kept its white patterns as the car rolled on. Through the open window the petals lifted and streamed out across the desert behind her, one after another, until the road ahead was the only thing left to look at.