Two traditional style colour tattoos on forearms, one showing a bottle with a CONSTRUCT banner and flowers, the other showing scissors with a CREATE banner and flowers.

Construct bottle and create scissors on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown close together, each with a traditional style tattoo. The left design shows a bottle with a brush-like top and a banner reading CONSTRUCT, framed by blue, orange and red flowers and green leaves. The right design shows a pair of scissors with a CREATE banner and red and pink flowers, with bold black outlines and solid colour fills throughout.

Traditional Forearm Bottle Scissors Banner Lettering Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sailmaker's shears had been ground so often they were thinner than a herring's spine, and Oda kept them in her apron pocket the whole crossing from Stavanger to the Newfoundland banks. Her brother Tam carried the bottle, a brown apothecary's flask with a cork stopper wrapped in tarred twine. Inside, rolled tight as a spill, was a list of what they meant to make when they landed: a boat, a house with two doors, a name for the baby who was not yet born.

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On the nineteenth night the mainsail split along a seam and the flask went over the rail with the spare lamp oil. Tam leaned out after it, then sat down hard on the deck and said nothing could be made now. Oda said nothing was lost that had not been written down. She cut the spare canvas into strips as wide as her hand and sat stitching by the lantern until the wind dropped and the sky went the colour of pewter.

The sea gave the flask back at Fogo, three days later, cracked along one side and washed clean of everything except a single word on the paper, the letters bleeding blue into the grain. The rest of the list had gone to pulp. Tam held it up to the light and read it aloud, and Oda laughed until she had to sit down on the shingle.

They built the boat from the sail, the house from driftwood, and the name came from a neighbour who had never seen the list at all. Oda kept the shears. Tam kept the flask, empty, on the windowsill with its cork pushed back in. Every morning he said the one word to it, and every morning Oda took up the scissors and set to work on whatever needed cutting.