Colour tattoo of a kokeshi doll in a red patterned kimono with pink cherry blossom branches and an orange sun, in Japanese style, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokeshi doll with cherry blossom on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A kokeshi doll with a black bob, red hair ornaments and closed eyes stands in a red kimono with dark patterned detail. Pink cherry blossom branches curve up either side of the doll, with an orange sun behind it. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with smooth colour blends across the hair, kimono and sun.

Japanese Thigh Cherry blossom Kimono Sun Hair ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the valley of Kamiyashiki, where the snow stayed until the plum was nearly out, a turner called Haruo made dolls from cherry wood for every girl born in the valley. He never painted their eyes. Eyes are for when a doll goes out into the world, he told the mothers, and they accepted this, because he was the only turner who could make a neck turn so smoothly that the head seemed to nod on its own.

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In the last week of snow a stranger came up the road pulling a cart of cherry branches that had been cut too early and had already opened pink at the tips. He wanted a doll for his daughter, who was to be taken to the city in spring to work in a teahouse, and he said she would be lonely there. Haruo turned the head from a block that had dried three winters on his shelf. He carved the hair as a dark bob with two red pins, the way the girls wore them in the old picture books, and he dressed the body in a red robe with swirling patterns cut fine as frost.

When the doll was finished he wrapped it in a cloth with a sprig of blossom and told the man to keep it closed until the road was dry, and to open it only when the girl was ready to be seen. The man paid with a lacquer bowl the colour of an autumn sun and walked back down the valley, the branches swaying either side of his cart.

In spring a carter brought word from the city. A girl had opened a box on a rainy morning and found a doll with its eyes still shut. She sat with it on the windowsill until the sun rose orange over the rooftops, then painted its eyes herself, badly, and kept it for the rest of her life. The blossom on the cart had long since fallen by the time the road dried, and nobody in the valley thought to sweep it up.