Colour tattoo of a kokeshi-style doll in a red kimono with cherry blossoms, in a Japanese style, on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokeshi doll with cherry blossom kimono on forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A kokeshi-style doll with a black bob, red hair ornament, rosy cheeks and closed eyes is tattooed on the forearm. The red kimono has white and pink cherry blossoms, a yellow and green obi-style band and a diamond-patterned panel, all outlined in dark linework with smooth shading. The design fills the forearm against a plain dark sleeve and a pale background.

Japanese Forearm Kimono Cherry blossom Hair ornament Doll Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll had sat on the schoolroom windowsill at Hanamura since the spring the river flooded, and every Monday the caretaker's wife dusted her red kimono and told her the news. Nobody came back for her. Her painted eyes stayed shut, her cheeks faded a shade, and the cherry blossoms on her sleeves kept their pink while the paint on the bell rope flaked away.

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Then the reunion came, forty-one years late, and the classmates shuffled in with walking sticks and reading glasses. Teruko Watanabe, who had once sat beside that window, stopped in the doorway. Her mother had turned the doll on a lathe from a single block of cherry wood, the way the old woman in the next valley taught, and had given her a black bob and a red ribbon so she would look like the girls in the class photograph. Teruko had left her behind the morning her family moved to the coast.

The caretaker's wife kept a ledger of lost things, and she read out the entries while the old people gathered round. A fountain pen. A child's mitten. A paper crane folded from a homework sheet. When she reached the doll she said it had been waiting for the girl who would recognise it, and Teruko laughed and said she had not come to take anything home. She only wanted to know whether the doll had kept her word.

What word, the caretaker's wife asked. Teruko said she had promised, on the last morning, that she would come back when the blossom fell. It was the first week of May, and petals were drifting through the open window to settle in the folds of the red kimono, as if someone had already swept them there. Nobody moved. Outside, the river ran high and brown, and the doll kept her eyes closed, listening.