Colour tattoo of a smiling matryoshka nesting doll with red poppies and a pale blue wash behind it, on a lower limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matryoshka doll with poppies on a lower limb

Other · Colour · Photo

A matryoshka nesting doll with a rosy face, dark eyes and a red headscarf fills the frame, its painted body decorated with red poppies and green leaves. The shading is soft and blended, with a pale blue wash behind the doll that fades at the edges. Bold reds and greens dominate the colour palette against the lighter skin tones of the doll's face.

Other Poppy Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The biggest doll would not come apart, and you had been working at its middle since breakfast, fingers sticky with the barley sugar Mrs Dunning let you have for sitting quietly. Her shop on Mill Lane smelled of paraffin and wet wool. The coronation bunting in the window had faded to the colour of weak tea, and behind the counter the wooden family stood in order of size, the tallest in a red headscarf with poppies climbing her skirts like a fire that had got out of hand.

Keep reading

When the top half finally lifted away, there was another doll inside, and another inside that, down to a seventh no bigger than a thimble. Its face was bare wood. Mrs Dunning said her husband's uncle had carved the set in a village above the river before the war, and that he had gone off to fight before he could paint the last one. "Somebody ought to finish her," she said, and pressed a brush into your hand as if it had been waiting in her apron pocket all along.

You painted at the kitchen table for a week after school, with the pale blue wash left over from the tin your father used on the front gate. Your mother said you would ruin your eyes. The red poppies took three coats before they stopped looking like smudges, and the cheeks needed a patience you did not know you had until it was there. On the last evening you lifted the brush away from the little mouth and held your breath.

When you carried the set back to Mill Lane, Mrs Dunning did not look at the faces first. She turned the smallest doll over, and on its base, under the varnish, was a pencilled date from before the war and a second signature, faint and careful, that was not yours. She laughed, a short surprised sound, and fitted the seven dolls back together one by one. The blue wash showed at the seam as the last one closed, and she set the family in the window, where the bunting could not reach it.