Mimi Kirchner’s Tattoo Dolls

WORDS Malibongwe Tyilo

Fabric dolls covered with tattoos are some of this fine arts graduate’s stock in trade.

The online shop descriptions read: “A beefy tattooed man”, “A curvy tattooed lady wearing red pants”. Together, those descriptions wouldn’t sound out of place in a novel about the nocturnal activities of sailors. Dolls would certainly not be first to come to mind, but, then again, Boston-based artist Mimi Kirchner’s hand-made toile-covered creations depicting circus performers, pirates and more are anything but typical.

“With the tattooed men, there’s this bar that we like to go to and there’s this waitress there who has this big tattoo on her back, and I was thinking to myself, that would be fun, to make a doll with a tattoo,” says the artist.

Prior to following her passion for dolls, Mimi graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, after which she got into pottery and spent the next 20 years “distracted by clay”.

“When I started making cloth dolls, there was this instant gratification; I could make one in a day instead of a month, and then I realised I had 500 dolls waiting to be made,” says Mimi about her line of dolls, which includes the cutest poodles, pugs, fish and owls in addition to the mysterious tattooed characters that caught our eye.

Find Mimi’s work on Etsy here.