Traditional style colour tattoo of three nesting matryoshka dolls with pink flowers and green leaves on a forearm, shown in two side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nesting dolls and flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three stacked matryoshka dolls, each with a red headscarf, dark hair and a patterned red, teal and yellow body, with pink blossoms and green leaves filling the gaps around them. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing. The red, pink, teal and green palette is strong against the skin, and the image pairs a close view with a second angle of the same forearm.

Traditional Forearm Flower Blossom Leaves Doll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have found the windfalls by the time you reach the back wall of the orchard, and Vera has already gone in for her tea, leaving you the ladder, the wheelbarrow and a key on a loop of string that opens the potting shed. Inside it smells of creosote and dry soil. The dolls sit on the top shelf behind a row of biscuit tins, five of them, lined up by height like children waiting to be counted.

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You take the largest down first, its red headscarf chipped at the brow, and twist. It parts at the waist with a dry little click. Inside is another woman, a shade narrower, her flowers painted in the same teal and cream, and inside her another, and another, until the sixth is no bigger than a thimble and has no face at all, only a smudge of pale paint where the eyes should be.

Your grandmother painted them, Vera says from the doorway, when you carry the set out into the light. She did the faces on the first three and got tired of it. 'The last one's yours to finish if you want.' You don't want. You turn the blank one in your palm while the afternoon goes gold over the Bramley trees and a wasp walks across the back of your hand without any interest in you at all.

You fit them back together in order, smallest tucked inside, and set the largest on the windowsill facing the door, so that whoever comes in next will see her first and wonder how many of her there are.