Black and grey ink drawing of a crab gripping a spool of thread and needle, framed by sunburst rays and a looping thread, with the word Cancer beneath.

Crab with spool and needle, Cancer design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink illustration of a crab with its claws around a spool of thread and a needle, with a single thread looping around the body. Fine hatching and cross-hatching give the crab and spool shape and shadow, with grey wash on the shell and spool. Sunburst rays above and below frame the central motif, and the word Cancer with a short italic line sits beneath it on a white background.

Crab Spool Thread Needle Sunburst Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's worn where my father put his boot every morning for forty years. Sit there by the lamp housing, where the warmth comes off it. Now. You want the crab story, not the sea story, though out here the two are one and the same.

Keep reading

Nan Hollis kept the light on Scarth Ness, and she mended nets for the boats below to pay for the coal. Every spring the crabs came up the slipway in their hundreds and tore the mesh, and every spring the men cursed them. Nan never cursed. She took her needle and her grey twine and stitched the holes shut while the crabs were still clamped on the knots, gripping like vices. Her fingers were scraped raw by June and her knuckles split with salt. She kept one crab alive on her windowsill, a big old hen with a notch in one claw, and she called it Foreman.

In February a gale took the lower gate off the cellar, and a boy from the cottages came up the cliff path with blood running down his shin. Nan sat him on the fish box and stitched him by the lamp, pulling the thread tight through the torn skin while Foreman watched from the sill with one eye on the rags. The boy didn't cry. He asked if the scar would show. She said only if he went looking for it.

That summer the boats came back empty and the whole coast blamed the light. Nan climbed the tower every night and turned the lens by hand when the clockwork seized, and she never once put down the needle. By October the nets came up whole and the boats came home full, and Foreman still sat on the sill with his claws wrapped round the spool, holding on the way she had taught him.