Colour tattoo on an upper thigh showing Totoro beside a campfire with Calcifer, soot sprites and small white forest spirits under a night sky.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro and forest spirits scene on a thigh

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full-colour scene shows a large grey Totoro holding a leaf, seated beside a glowing orange fire spirit and a small yellow creature on a grassy mound. Pale forest spirits stand among pink flowers, and a large tree rises behind them with black soot sprites drifting across a deep blue night sky. Soft shading and blended greens, blues and yellows fill the arched composition, which is photographed straight on against a patterned fabric.

Upper arm Totoro Soot sprite Tree Campfire Night sky Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The soot sprites had been dropping off the old ash in the allotment for three nights before Maud thought to ask Dennis from number nine what they were. He was leaning on the gate with a tin of bantam feed, squinting at the black smudges bobbing above the hedge like flakes of cinder that had learned to float.

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'Those are the dust-children,' he said, which was no help at all, and then, because he had lived on the lane longer than anyone, 'You don't sweep them off. Leave them a drop of lamp oil and they'll go and find their own tree.' Maud didn't believe him until the Thursday, when she came back from the bus stop in the rain and found a grey shape the size of a garden bench asleep under the cherry, holding a dock leaf over its head like an umbrella.

The fire was already lit in the old bucket by the compost heap. A small orange thing sat on the rim, flickering and sulking, and when she set down the kettle it grumbled, in a voice like someone stirring soup, that the kettle was too heavy and the wood was damp. Three pale figures with round faces watched from behind the rhubarb, and a yellow bird with a wide beak waddled through the mud, complaining about it at length.

She fetched her father's lamp oil from the shed, measured a capful into the bucket, and sat down on an upturned crate to wait. The grey creature woke, considered her with a face that was mostly eyebrows, and yawned until the leaves shook. When the first soot sprite finally drifted down and settled on her knee, she found she was smiling, and the rain stopped as if someone had turned off a tap.