Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded black and grey matryoshka doll above a wrist band of a yellow flower with dark green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matryoshka doll and yellow flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A man's forearm and wrist are shown, with his hand resting in the front pocket of dark jeans. Above the wrist, a black and grey matryoshka doll with a flower on its body is outlined in bold linework and softly shaded. A band of a yellow and orange flower with dark leaves and small dotted stamens wraps around the wrist in flat colour.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the garden doesn't like shouting. Now. Halfway down the lane there was a woman called Yelena Morozova who painted dolls for the Sunday fair, and she kept one set back for herself. Seven of them, each fitting inside the last, and on the belly of the middle one she'd painted a flower the colour of an egg yolk, with little dots standing up in its heart like pins in a cushion.

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The dolls argued the way dolls do when nobody can see them. The biggest one said she had the most room in her, so she had the most to say. The smallest, no taller than a barley grain, said nothing at all. Every evening the biggest one opened herself up and let the others out to sit on the bench under the apple tree, where the light was kind, and every morning Tomas the gardener's boy swept the fallen leaves around their feet without ever once asking why they were there.

Then one October the smallest doll rolled off the bench and into the marigold bed. Nobody saw her go. The others called and called, and the eldest only cracked a little with worry. But the smallest had already pressed herself into the soil, and the yellow flower on her belly split open and sent down roots and up shoots, dark green and sharp at the edges, which climbed the bench legs and wound themselves round the fence post, three times, like a bracelet someone meant to keep.

So if you go down that lane now, look at the fence post at the bottom. You'll see the leaves, and you'll see the yellow flower on top of them, and if you're patient and Tomas isn't watching, you might see a second flower, smaller, that is still deciding whether it's ready to come out.