Black and grey botanical sleeve tattoo on an upper arm showing Totoro holding an umbrella, with smaller Totoro figures and soot sprites among leaves.

Totoro and soot sprites on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large Totoro holding an umbrella, a smaller Totoro beside it, and three round soot sprites with wide eyes at the base of the design. Leaves and foliage fill the background and wrap around the arm. The linework is fine and sketchy, with stippled dotwork shading on the characters' bodies, and the design is rendered in black ink and greys.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Totoro Soot sprite Umbrella Leaves Foliage Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came in sideways off the breakwater the week my mother stopped speaking to the ferry company, and that was the week the grey thing started sheltering at the bus stop on Quay Road. Nobody else seemed to notice at first. Mr Pellow at the chandlery swore it was a heap of wet sacks until it blinked.

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It was the size of a wheelie bin on its hind legs, round as a bread loaf, and it held a black umbrella with a bent spoke over its head as if the rain were a personal insult. Beside it stood a smaller one, quieter, who only wanted to watch the gulls. I found them most evenings when I walked home from the net loft, and I started carrying a flask in my coat pocket because they looked cold, though I never once saw either of them drink.

The soot sprites lived in the boat sheds under the slipway. Three of them, round as conkers, with eyes so wide you could see the harbour lights swimming in them. They rolled out whenever the tide went low and climbed back up the steps as though they had been sent to fetch something. My father had kept his nets in that shed for thirty years. The week after his funeral the sprites vanished, and the loft smelled of tar and nothing else.

On Thursday I took the umbrella off the hook in the hall, the one nobody had opened since him, and walked it down to the stop. The big one tipped its head, pleased, and took it without a word. Next morning the bench was dry, the umbrella lay folded on top of his old oilskin, and three black balls were rolling back under the slipway, as if they had only ever wanted to be somewhere out of the wet.