Watercolour-style tattoo of a Totoro-like character with blue, pink and yellow washes and two black kanji characters, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Watercolour Totoro with kanji on a shoulder blade

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A fine black outline of a forest spirit creature with a rounded belly and pointed ears sits on the upper back. Loose, bleeding washes of blue, pink, yellow and teal fill the figure and spread outward in splashes, while two black kanji characters sit to the right. The composition is centred on the shoulder blade and the colour is the dominant element.

Back Totoro Creature Kanji Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit at Harrow Bank took men down at six and sent them up at dusk, and in the hard winter after the lock-out the two Shaw sisters climbed the fell path each morning with a basket between them, because no one else in the row had time to gather kindling. Agnes was the elder and gave the orders. Nell was the younger and noticed things.

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The creature lived in the hollow oak above the spoil heap. Nell found it sheltering from sleet under a sycamore leaf, a grey round thing with ears like a hare's and eyes like two wet pennies. It did not speak. It hummed, low enough to feel in the teeth. Where it sat, the frost thawed and small blue flowers pushed up through the coal dust. Agnes said it was nonsense, then left a heel of bread on the stone every morning anyway, and the bread was always gone by noon.

In February the cage jammed at the Harrow Bank shaft with eleven men below. The women stood at the pit gate all night with their shawls over their heads. Nell slipped away with the lamp and found the creature waiting at the foot of the path, its belly swirling with colour, as if someone had dropped paints into a puddle. It walked ahead of her down the slope, and where its feet touched the wet ground the mud went firm as flagstone. Agnes came running behind, shouting her name, then stopped, and followed too.

The men came up at first light, grey and coughing but whole. Afterwards Agnes cut two characters into the basket lid, one for elder and one for younger, and set it on the stone. In the morning the bread was gone and the basket was full of dry kindling, and beside it, pressed into the frost, were two sets of small prints and one round one, wandering back up the fell.