Colour tattoo on a thigh of two Totoro characters on a blossom branch, with a watercolour sky, neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro characters with cherry blossom on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two cartoon Totoro characters, a large grey one holding a pink flower and a smaller blue one, sitting on a branch with pink blossoms and green leaves. A tiny white creature sits on the large Totoro's head, and a yellow butterfly flies above. The bold outlines and smooth shading are paired with a loose, watercolour-style sky in yellow, blue, green and purple behind the figures.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Totoro Cherry blossom Branch Flower Leaves Butterfly Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Court had been out since March, so I was climbing the stairs to the fourteenth floor with Mrs Okafor's shopping in one hand and the rail in the other when I first saw the cherry tree. Nobody had planted it. It was a bare stick in a paint tin on her balcony, two feet high, with a strip of red wool knotted round it. Her grandson had brought it back from a garden centre in Bolton, she said, and she didn't believe it would ever flower.

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I didn't believe it either, until a wet evening when the wind dropped and I heard a noise on the landing like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. A creature sat on the window ledge, no bigger than a loaf, white as a sugar cube, with a leaf balanced on its head. It regarded me the way the bus driver does when you board without the right change. Then the mist lifted off the playing fields, and I saw a grey shape standing among the goalposts, tall as the bus shelter, holding something up to the streetlamp as if to show it to the moon.

I told Mrs Okafor only about the tree. At dawn she went out in her slippers and found the first pink bud, and she laughed so loudly that the couple below banged on their ceiling. A small blue one, no taller than a cat, was perched on the balcony rail beside her, looking very pleased with itself.

The yellow butterfly came over the car park at breakfast and settled on the red wool. We both watched it. Neither of us mentioned the lift, which the council promised would be fixed by Friday, or the stairs, or the grey shape that had gone back into the mist. We just kept our tea warm and let the blossom open.