Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a Totoro character surrounded by red cherry blossoms on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro and cherry blossom on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large grey forest spirit with a small creature on its head, seated among red cherry blossom branches and falling petals. The linework is fine and dark, with loose, washed blue, orange and pink shading that gives a painterly watercolour effect. Colour is bold and fills most of the design, which is framed by the curve of the upper arm and shoulder.

Upper arm Totoro Cherry blossom Flower Petal Creature Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spring the mill stopped, my father sent me up the hill with a basket of rice cakes and orders not to look at anything in the grove. I looked anyway. Beneath the oldest cherry, where the path bends toward the shrine, a grey shape the size of a cart sat with its legs stuck out like a child resting after a long walk. Its face was round and clever, its ears were pale as upturned teacups, and on top of its head sat a small green creature holding a single acorn in both hands, as carefully as a lantern.

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The big one never spoke. The acorn creature did, in short whistles that I understood better than I should have. The stream below our terraces had gone thin and brown, and the water wheel was groaning on dry air. They wanted the acorn planted where the stream bent, so I borrowed my father's spade the next morning and dug a hole in the cold mud while the petals came down around me like slow snow. I did not ask why an oak was needed to save a mill. Nobody in our valley ever asked the forest for reasons.

My father called me a fool for a week. Then the water came back, clear and fast, and he stopped calling me anything at all. He took the basket up the hill himself one evening, and it came back heavy with petals that he laid in the millrace, one by one, until the whole channel ran pink as dawn. Years later I still climb up with my own children and leave rice cakes on the flat stone. The grey shape is gone, but when the wind turns, the cherry drops its blossom on the path in a neat pale trail, and I follow it home.