Black and grey dotwork drawing of ornate scissors whose handles and blades form butterfly wings, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly-winged scissors design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical drawing of a pair of scissors with ornate, scrolled handles and butterfly wings in place of the lower blades' pivot area. The design is built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines that create shading along the wing panels, handles and blades. It is shown in greyscale on a plain, pale grey background with a dashed vertical centre line.

Dotwork Scissors Butterfly Wing Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Oakley had lodged at Seaview House for eleven summers before she left her scissors on the breakfast table, and my mother would not let me touch them. They were old and heavy, the handles scrolled like the ironwork on the pier, and where the blades crossed someone had fitted a pair of wings, so that when the light came through the window the whole thing looked ready to lift off the cloth. 'Those are for silk,' Mother said, and moved them to the dresser with a tea towel over them, as if they might bite.

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Mrs Oakley did not come back for them. The letter we sent to her address in Bristol came back unopened, and by October the room was let to a naval cook who slept with his boots on. I took the scissors down one wet afternoon when the house was empty and the sea was grey beyond the railings. I held the handles the way I had watched her hold them, two fingers through the rings, and the blades opened with a sound like a sparrow shaking out its feathers.

Inside the drawer I found a card, and on it, in pencil, a list: sheets, two pillowcases, the blue wool, tide table for Thursday. Underneath she had written, Cut the tape before the next one comes, and nothing more. I did not know what tape, or who the next one was. I only knew she had kept her scissors sharp for the day she needed them.

I took them down to the front and cut the bunting that had sagged off the promenade rail since August, one strand at a time, until the wings were wet with spray and the last scrap fluttered into the water. My mother watched from the step with her arms folded. She said nothing about the silk. She only held out her hand for the scissors, and when I gave them back, for once she did not put them on the dresser.