Black and grey tattoo on a forearm showing Totoro under an umbrella beside the grinning Catbus, with shaded grass and leaves.

Totoro and Catbus on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows Totoro sheltering under a leaf and an umbrella, with the grinning Catbus climbing above on the upper arm. Bold black outlines define the characters, while soft grey shading gives the fur, grass and background depth. The design wraps around the forearm against a plain pale skin tone and a blurred indoor background.

Japanese Forearm Totoro Umbrella Leaves Grass Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Cross agreed on what colour the bus was, only that it came down the lane on the wettest nights, when the ditches ran over and the sheep stood with their backs to the weather. Mrs Ada Fenwick had seen it twice in fifty years and told both times the same way, with her hand flat on the kitchen table as if to keep it still.

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Her grandson Tom did not believe a word of it until the night his mother's car went into the ford below the mill. He stood at the crossroads with a borrowed umbrella that kept turning inside out, shouting at the dark for a lift. Something round and grey came up out of the hedge instead. It was taller than the gatepost and said nothing, but it lifted a leaf the size of a cartwheel over his head and held it there with both hands, patient as a hen. Tom stood under it and the rain stopped drumming on his hood.

Then the bus came, its headlamps two green coins and its stripes dripping, with a grin so wide it seemed to start somewhere behind its ears. The door folded open without a sound. Tom asked where it was going and the bus opened its mouth wider, which Ada had always said was an answer. The round grey one gave him a shove between the shoulder blades and he climbed aboard, and the bus took him through the rain at a speed that should not have been possible on Hollin Lane.

He was set down at his mother's gate, dry to the knee. The ford was quiet and the car was sitting on the bank with its lights off. The next evening Tom walked back to the crossroads with his grandmother's good black umbrella and propped it against the hedge. By morning it was gone. In the wet grass beside the gatepost there was a flattened ring the size of a cartwheel, and a little way off, a long pale trail where something had stretched and gone home.