Black and grey line drawing of a kokeshi style doll with a cat face, surrounded by cherry blossoms and petals, in a Japanese style tattoo design with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokeshi doll with cherry blossoms

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a kokeshi style doll with a cat face, a bobbed hairstyle and a large bow on the side of the head. The doll wears a kimono with dotwork shading and sits among cherry blossom flowers, leaves and falling petals, with a peony like flower at the lower centre. Fine hatched lines define the hair and the blossoms, and the composition is symmetrical and evenly spaced across the frame.

Japanese Dotwork Cat face Cherry blossom Bow Kimono Petal Peony Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hana had been turning dolls on her late father's lathe for eleven winters, and every one of them had a face the buyers liked: round, pink-cheeked, unbothered. The cat-eared one came off the chisel by mistake in March, when the cherry trees along the Oyado canal were already dropping petals onto the workshop step. She had been tired and the grain ran crooked, and the face that opened under her gouge had whiskers.

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She meant to throw it on the fire. Instead she carried it out to the garden behind the shop, where her neighbour Mrs Sato kept a peony bed that had outlived three owners of the house. Mrs Sato came out with tea in two cups, looked at the doll, and laughed until she had to sit on the edge of the step.

"It's a cat," she said. "It's a kokeshi that has been out in the rain too often and has decided to be someone else."

They argued about it through the afternoon. Hana said the buyers wanted sweetness, a tidy fringe, a bow that stayed put. Mrs Sato said the peony would open whether anybody approved or not, and that a doll with ears was a doll that could hear the petals coming. They set the figure on the wall under the plum, its kimono dotted like frost on a windowpane, and left it there to see what the wind would do.

By May the bow had faded to the colour of weak tea and the hem had gathered a lace of blossom. Hana still hadn't sold it. When customers asked, she said it was not finished yet, which was true, and each morning she came out with her cup and found another petal caught in its black hair, as neat as a stitch.