Black and grey tattoo of a Totoro-style character framed by peony-like flowers and grape clusters on the upper arm and shoulder, with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro-style character with flowers on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A rounded, Totoro-style forest creature with large ears, whiskers and a dotted body sits in front of dense clusters of peony-like blooms, leaves and grape-like bunches. The linework is fine and crisp, with stippled dotwork on the creature and hatched shading across the petals and foliage. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, photographed close up with the edge of a dark garment at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Totoro Creature Flower Peony Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had stopped counting the bunches the fox took, but she never stopped counting the muddy prints that came after, four small toes pressed into the path between the peonies. "Badger," her brother Tom said from the gate, not bothering to look. "Badgers have claws, Ada, and they dig." She said nothing and moved the bowl of dried plums a little nearer the wall.

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On the third night of the frost she sat on an upturned bucket with her shawl knotted under her chin and waited. The moon came over the orchard wall and silvered the grape leaves. Something shifted in the peony heads, which were as big as cabbages that year and heavy with rain. A round grey shape rose up with its ears folded down like dock leaves, a body speckled all over with dots, and whiskers like three fine lengths of wire. It looked at her with one wide dark eye, and neither of them moved.

"Those are my grapes," she said at last. "Harold planted that vine the year we married." The creature blinked, turned, took a plum from the bowl and pressed it down into the mud like a seed.

In the morning she went out with the secateurs meaning to take the crowded canes before the blight did. But the dead wood was already gone, cut clean at the joints, the bruised stems tied back with grass. Only the good fruit still hung there, and on the wall where Harold used to sit lay a single peony petal, curled like a note.