Colour tattoo of a stitched blue ragdoll character with red hair and large eyes, holding a small tombstone-style design, shown on a forearm in three side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stitched ragdoll with red hair on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a stitched, blue-skinned ragdoll character with long red hair and large pale eyes, seated beside a tombstone-shaped panel with a small lettered inscription and a dark crow-like figure. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth painterly shading on the face and hair. Blue, red and green tones dominate, and the three photographs show the piece from slightly different angles.

Neo-trad Forearm Stitches Tombstone Red hair Crow Doll

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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 last waltz at the Saltcote Ballroom was the one nobody requested, so the bandleader played it twice. You sat at the edge of the stage with your sewing kit open across your knees, working a split seam on a rag doll you had made for the pier stall in March. The thread was the only spool of red left in Mrs Abbott's shop, and you had bought it with the last of your wages, so you were not going to waste a single length.

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At half past eleven a man in a long black coat came in out of the rain with a crow on his shoulder. He did not dance. He crossed the sprung floor to the stage, set a small grey stone at your feet, and tapped the chalked name on its face with one finger. It was the name you had stitched into the doll's apron years ago, in wobbling capitals, and you had never told anyone where it came from. "You've been stitching that name shut for a long time," he said, not unkindly. "Let me have a turn."

You should have said no. Instead you handed him the doll, and he held it against his chest the way you would hold a sleeping child, while the crow tugged loose one red thread with its beak. The band slid into the waltz again. Round the floor they went, the doll's stiff limbs swinging, and with each turn another stitch came free, until the seam you had mended all evening lay open and the stuffing drifted down onto the boards like snow.

When the music stopped, the man was gone, and so was the doll. Only the stone remained, and beside it a neat coil of red thread, every length the exact measure of the seam you had been mending. You picked it up, threaded your needle, and began again, because some things are only ever finished by the one who starts them.