Two people holding hands, each with a colourful neo-trad matryoshka doll and rose tattoo on the upper arm.

Matching matryoshka doll and rose tattoos

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two matching tattoos of a matryoshka doll with a dark red rose across the front of its body are shown on the upper arms of two people who are holding hands. The bold black outlines and solid fills give the design a neo-traditional look, with pink, yellow and teal tones on the doll's headscarf and dress. The photo is taken outdoors against greenery, with the two tattoos placed side by side and the arms angled towards the centre of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and I am too old to tell this twice. You want the one about the doll with the rose on her belly? Then mind the sawdust. The Blackwood Travelling Circus had nine wagons left the spring the elephant died, and by autumn the only treasure we had was Mrs Orlova's painted box, rattling in the back of the cook's wagon, its rose gone the colour of old wine.

Keep reading

Inside the box sat a doll, and inside her another, each one smaller and sulkier, until the last was no bigger than a thimble and would not open for anybody. Teodor Fell, our ringmaster, a man who had sold more hope than tickets, wanted the set shipped to a dealer in Bath to pay the feed bill. Ivy Marsh, who fed the ponies and slept under the caravan, had other ideas. Every night she sat on the step and undid the dolls one by one, laying them out on the boards like coins she meant to count twice.

On the ninth night the thimble doll slipped from her fingers and rolled beneath the wheels. Ivy lay flat in the mud with a candle, and when she fetched it back there was a folded slip of paper rolled tight inside. It was a deed to a meadow outside Shrewsbury, signed by a Russian grandmother nobody had ever met, with a rose drawn in the corner in red ink.

We packed the wagons that week and pulled out at first light, the thimble doll still shut in Ivy's pocket. The ponies walked ahead as if they knew the road. Last June I saw that meadow myself, and the grass there grows in a ring of pink, the way a rose opens when nobody is looking.

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