Crab, thread spool and sunburst design

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn design of a crab with its claws around a thread spool and needle, with a looping thread running around its body. Sunburst rays with scalloped bases sit above and below the crab, and the word CANCER with a short italic line of text appears underneath. The linework is fine and hatched, with light grey shading on the crab and spool, on a plain white background.

Crab Thread Spool Needle Sunburst

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

Mrs Ada Pilling kept her mending basket on the windowsill of the tailor's shop in Hollin Row, and every Thursday the fishermen's wives brought her their torn oilskins and their children's knees. She never asked how a thing had been torn. She only asked whether they wanted it sewn to hold or sewn to look pretty, and most said hold.

Keep reading

One February a boy came in from the harbour with his coat split from collar to hem and blood on the cuff. His mother had sent him, but she had not come herself. Ada sat him on the stool by the stove and threaded her needle with the grey linen, the strong stuff she saved for sails. She told him the crab would be quick if he kept still. He kept still. The crab that had nipped him was in a bucket by the quay, she said, and it had been waiting for someone to come along and make a fuss about it.

She worked the seam closed in small, hard stitches, drawing the thread tight each time until the edges met like lips. Halfway through, the boy asked whether the scar would show. Ada bit the thread and said that a scar was only a line that had decided to stay. Then she gave him back his coat, and a button she had found in her tin, and a spool of the grey thread for his mother.

He came back every Thursday after that, not for mending but to sit by the stove. By spring he could tie a bowline and by summer he had sewn his own sleeve. Ada never said she was proud of him. She only left the back door open on the wet nights, in case someone came up from the water needing a stitch.