Colour tattoo of a black nesting doll with large green eyes and red lips, surrounded by pink, red and purple flowers, on the upper arm.

Matryoshka doll with roses on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A matryoshka doll with large green eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips sits on a black ground, with a teal and black lattice pattern across the top of its head. Bold black outlines define the doll, and orange scallops and a white band cross its body above the flowers. Pink, red and purple roses, a peony and smaller red flowers with green leaves fill the lower half in bright colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses along the back fence had gone leggy by June, and Auntie Vera had never once pruned them in my lifetime. I was on my knees in the bed with a pair of secateurs when the wheelbarrow tipped and the lid of the old shed trunk came loose, and out rolled the smallest doll, the one with the peony on her skirt.

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Vera kept them lined up on the windowsill in order of size, a black-skirted family with lashes painted like brushstrokes and cheeks the colour of cherry blossom. She used to say the dolls were for keeping secrets, that you opened one and found another, and another, until the last was no bigger than a thimble and held nothing but a rolled slip of paper. I had always thought that was a story she made up to make us sit still.

I unscrewed them one after another on the kitchen table, lining them up as I went. Seven in all. The middle ones had red-cheeked faces and purple roses on their aprons; the larger ones bloomed pink down their sides. The paper in the smallest was no secret, just a list in Vera's square capitals: ROSES, MARCH. PEONY, SHADY SIDE. SAVE THE GREEN BEANS FOR MRS HOLLOWAY.

I went out with the list and the little doll in my pocket and cut the old canes down to two buds each, the way she had written. By evening the bed looked bare and foolish, so I set the smallest doll on the sill above the sink, where she could watch the fence and wait for next June.

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