Traditional-style colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a grey Totoro character under a umbrella with pink flowers, above a red rose and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Totoro under an umbrella with a red rose on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey Totoro character sheltering under a dark umbrella with scalloped trim, flanked by two pink flowers with green leaves. Below sits a large red rose with dark green leaves, which forms the base of the composition. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, green, pink and grey are used throughout, with some soft shading on the umbrella and rose petals.

Traditional Upper arm Totoro Umbrella Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The umbrella had been in lost property for nine days before anyone came asking for it, and by then Ines Varga had stopped noticing the grey creature stitched inside its lining. It was a small thing with a round belly and two ears like folded leaves, sewn in blue thread by someone patient. Rain kept the checkpoint quiet on Tuesdays, so she had time to turn it over and wonder who sews a friend into the inside of a thing you hold over your head.

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Teodor Halas arrived at half past eleven with a red rose wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, its stem dripping onto his good shoes. He said the umbrella belonged to his granddaughter, Mira, who had left it on the number nine bus and cried all the way to school without it. Ines asked him to describe it. He described the scalloped trim and the two pink flowers painted on the handle in a hurry, then he stopped, because he had not known about the creature inside.

She passed it across the counter anyway. He opened it under the strip light, and the grey creature looked up at him through the dark canvas, and his face did something the stamps and forms had never once asked of it. He pressed the handle against his chest. The rose he laid on the counter, where it stayed, going slowly limp beside the paperwork.

When he had gone, Ines went to the window. The rain had stopped. Under the pale sky the umbrella was moving up the road between the lorries, its scalloped edge bobbing, the creature hidden in its shade. The rose stayed on her desk until the end of her shift, and then she took it home and put it in a glass of water.