Colour full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing soot sprites, a hilltop castle, a girl with a cat and a bathhouse scene in a landscape of clouds and hills.

Studio Ghibli inspired full sleeve

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo shown from two sides, with a hilltop castle in the clouds at the shoulder, black soot sprites floating among the hills, and a girl riding a broom with a black cat. Lower down, a bathhouse with a pale masked spirit, a forest and a grassy hillside are rendered in soft shading and layered colour. Greens, yellows and blues dominate, with smooth gradients and detailed line work throughout.

Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Soot sprite Castle Cloud Girl Cat Spirit Mountain Forest Hill Landscape

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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 soot sprites came up the funicular track the night the ferry didn't dock, and by the time you reached the bathhouse on Gull Stair they had already filled the boiler room like a shoal of wet ink. Mrs Tallis was on her knees with a brush, shooing them towards the hatch in the same tone she used on the gulls.

Keep reading

You had been sent up from the harbour with a lamp and a letter for the castle keeper, who lived above the clouds on the old quarry rock and had not come down in nine years. The path was steep. A girl was already ahead of you, sitting sideways on a broom with a black cat asleep in her lap, her hair full of wind, and she laughed at your boots slipping on the wet grass as if she had been waiting.

Halfway up you saw the lights of the town below, the harbour wall, the tide sliding out past the breakwater. The sprites rode the updraught beside you, a dozen of them, dropping sooty pearls onto the hills, and where they landed the grass went yellow and then green. The girl said the keeper would not read the letter. He never read anything, she said, he only listened to the sea.

At the top the castle hung in cloud like a lantern nobody had lit. You knocked. The door opened on a warm room smelling of cedar and salt, and a pale masked face turned from the bath, wordless, and held out a hand for the letter. You gave it over. When you looked back the girl was gone, and far below, in the bathhouse yard, the boiler fire began to hum, which meant the town would have hot water by morning.