Black and grey fine line tattoo of a ball of yarn with two knitting needles crossing through it, on the inner forearm.

Ball of yarn and knitting needles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tightly wound ball of yarn with two knitting needles pushed through it at an angle, with the needle tips extending above and below the wool. The yarn is drawn with fine hatched strokes and soft grey shading that suggests the twisted texture of the strands. It is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and sits centrally on the forearm against plain skin.

Fine line Forearm Yarn Knitting needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wool had gone grey before the sheep did, and Mara knew the cold would come early. She sat by the hearth with the two bone needles her father had cut from a goat's shin the spring before he walked down to the coast and did not come back. Each evening she knitted a length, and each morning the village came to her door asking for it. A boy needed socks for the pass road. A widow needed a cap for a child with a cough. A carter with a torn hand wanted a band to bind it.

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She gave what they asked, and the ball in her lap grew smaller by a finger's width each time. Still, every dawn it had swelled back to its old size, round and tight, with the needles standing through it like masts. The elders said she was a witch and the elders were wrong, because witches do not go hungry, and Mara had eaten nothing but bread since the frost. She only knew that the wool came back as long as the needles stayed where they were.

One night in the deep of winter the headman's daughter came in out of the snow and asked her to stop. Everyone had taken from her, she said, and nobody had ever asked what Mara wanted left for herself. Mara looked at the ball for a long time. Then she drew out the needles, and the wool sagged in her hands like something that had only been holding its breath.

In the thaw the village found the ball on the sill, loose and quiet, with a single red thread wound round it. Nobody knew whose it was, or why it was there. The carter's hand had healed, the boy's socks were darned, and somewhere on the coast road a sleeve of grey wool was still keeping a man's wrist warm.