Colour Japanese-style arm sleeve showing a grey Totoro-like character, pink plum blossoms and orange chrysanthemums across the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro and chrysanthemums on a full arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A grey, round forest spirit resembling Totoro sits among pink plum blossoms and white cloud shapes on the upper arm, with small white figures near the top of the sleeve. Large orange and yellow chrysanthemums wrap down the forearm, with soft shading on the grey creature and clean, bold outlines around the flowers. Colour ink dominates the composition, and the sleeve is photographed against a plain white wall with the subject's face out of frame.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Totoro Chrysanthemum Cloud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums had come up through the cracked paving of the old bakery yard again, which Nell Harrow took as a personal insult from the soil. She knelt to tie back the stems with strips of an old bedsheet while her grandson Tobi sat on the wall swinging his heels and counting the clouds that drifted over the hill.

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Tobi was nine and certain of things. He said the big grey shape asleep in the plum thicket at the top of the allotments was not dead, only very old and very round, and that it had been there since before the railway. Every spring he carried a bowl of rice up the path and set it in the hollow of the roots, and every spring the bowl came back empty and cold, with three or four small white figures hanging about the branches like dandelion seeds that had decided to stay.

The council surveyor came in April with a clipboard and a face like wet cardboard. He wanted the plot cleared for flats by June. Nell stood in his path and told him the plum tree was not to be touched, that the grey one shelters under it when the wind turns, and that the little white ones would be cross. He laughed, politely, and then a gust came off the hill and the plum blossom came down in a rush, pink on his clipboard, pink in his hair, pink on the paper in a drift he could not brush away.

He wrote Retain tree in careful capitals and walked back down the hill without another word. That evening Nell pushed one more chrysanthemum into the soil by the gate, gold as a coin, and Tobi left his bedroom window open so the clouds could come in and see that everything was still where it belonged.