Colour traditional-style tattoo of a blue sewing spool and needle with banners reading MAY YOUR BOBBIN ALWAYS BE FULL, on a limb.

Blue spool with banners reading May your bobbin always be

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A blue sewing spool with a needle threaded through it sits at the centre of the design, with four grey and tan banners wrapping around it. The banners carry the lettering MAY YOUR BOBBIN ALWAYS BE FULL in blue, and the spool has bold black outlines with soft shading on the thread. The tattoo fills the frame against pale skin, with a blurred background of towels and tiles.

Traditional Other Spool Thread Banner Lettering Sewing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Hild had been mending the same grey habit for three days when the abbess came into the sewing room without knocking and set a blue spool on the table between them. "From the Tavistock women," she said. "They say it never runs out, which is nonsense, so you will have to find out for yourself."

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Hild turned the spool over. The thread was wound so tightly it shone, and the wooden flanges were worn smooth by someone else's thumbs. She threaded the needle, pulled a length through a rent in the sleeve, and sewed until the light from the high window had moved off the floor. When she looked down, the spool was as full as before.

She did not tell anyone at first. The brothers' sailcloth came in from the harbour torn and salt-stiff, and she mended it. The infirmary asked for bandage lengths, and she made them. Every day the bobbin stayed full, and every night she felt more like a thief. Something that gives without taking should be shared, she thought, so she began to hand it out: a stitch here for a widow's hem, a tuck there for a boy's coat.

The abbess noticed the cloth piling up on the shelves but not the thread running down. "You are wearing yourself to the bone," she said one evening. Hild held up the spool. "Look." The abbess took it, turned it over, and laughed until she had to sit. "Child, it was never the thread that was meant to stay full. It is the room." Hild looked round at the crowded shelves, the warm lamp, and the sisters coming in to sit with her. Then she set the spool down and went to put the kettle on.