Black and grey line drawing of a pair of scissors with a skull-like blade guard, wrapped in a ribbon, with the word Capricorn beneath it.

Capricorn scissors and ribbon design

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of pair of scissors with a skull-like pivot, a blade and ribbon wrapped around the blade in a spiral. A dotted circle sits above the scissors, and the word CAPRICORN with a short italic quote is printed below. The shading uses fine hatching on the ribbon and blades on a plain white background.

Scissors Ribbon Skull Dotted circle Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in the loft at Polmear Quay had touched the old shears since Uncle Tom went into the infirmary in March, so when Nell pulled open the bottom drawer and found them bound in green ribbon, she stood a while with the lamp in her hand. The pivot was cast like a bird's skull, the blades long and thin as a gull's bill, and the handles had gone stiff with salt. Outside the window the harbour bell knocked against the swell, slow and patient.

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The mainsail for the Morwenna lay across the trestle tables like a grey field, and it had to be re-seamed by Tuesday's tide or the boat would sit idle through the herring season. Above the bench, Tom's chalkboard still carried his New Year joke in square capitals: SOME ARE THE BANDAGE, SOME ARE THE KNIFE, SOME GET CREATIVE. Nell had always thought it a daft thing to write in a sail loft. Tonight it looked like an instruction.

She unwound the ribbon slowly, a spiral of it, and found it was not ribbon at all but a strip of sailcloth tape, marked along one edge in Tom's tidy pencil. Reef points. Cut here, not before. Nell fitted the blades to the line, and the shears sang once through the cloth, clean as a breath let go.

When she finished the panel at dawn, the sail lay flat and true. She tied the empty ribbon round the handles again in a neat bow and left the shears open on the bench, so that the first light could find them.