Colour tattoo of a blue and teal ball of yarn with a crochet hook through it, in a realistic style, on the calf.

Blue yarn ball with crochet hook on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a rounded ball of blue and teal yarn with a silver-grey crochet hook passing through it from left to right. The strands are outlined in black, with lighter teal highlights and darker blue shading that give the wool a rounded, textured look. A stippled dotwork shadow sits beneath the ball, and the skin around it is plain with no other marks visible.

Realism Dotwork Calf Yarn

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ball went off the roof at Hungerford lock and bounced twice on the coping stone before the Kennet took it. Teal and navy, the colour the river turns under the willows, which is why I bought it at Devizes in the first place. The hook was still tangled in the work. I had been stitching a granny square on the back deck while the boat sank in the lock, and the yarn ran from my lap, over the tiller and straight down into the brown water, pulling tight as a bell rope.

Keep reading

Dad taught me to crochet on this boat when I was nine, sat in the cratch with a bag of oddments from the market and insisting a chain was only a row of loops that had decided to hold hands. He never finished a blanket. He finished forty-odd squares, enough for a bed throw so lumpy the cat has claimed it, and a tea cosy that fits nothing. I still count stitches under my breath when I can't sleep, the way he did, one two three, as if the numbers might keep a boat level.

Ray, the lock keeper, came down the slimy steps with his boathook and fished for twenty minutes before the line came up heavy with weed and a sodden lump of wool. He handed it to me without a word. The ball had split along one seam, but the yarn was still whole, and I wound it back in stitch by stitch while the lock filled around us.

The hook came up last, dripping, with one loop still holding the square he had left unfinished.