Traditional colour tattoo of scissors, a ball of green yarn, a paintbrush, a pen nib and a red banner reading CRAFTY, with flowers, on a limb.

Crafty scissors and yarn tattoo

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Bold scissors sit over a green ball of yarn, with a paintbrush and pen nib crossing behind them and a red ribbon banner reading CRAFTY across the centre. Two flowers with button-style centres in orange and yellow frame the design, and a loose green thread curls at the lower right. The thick black outlines and solid colour fills give the piece a classic traditional look on smooth skin.

Traditional Other Scissors Yarn Paintbrush Flower Banner Thread Needle Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Halden Ford wanted to know what a woman carried over the river in the wet month, so she showed him. Scissors first, long-handled and ground on her father's wheel until the blades rang. Then the ball of green wool, wound so tight it held its shape even with rain on it. Then a brush with a cut-down handle, and a pen nib wrapped in oiled paper like a boiled sweet.

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He turned the scissors over in his fingers. "Tools for cutting cloth," he said. "Cloth pays the toll by the ell, you know that." She said she cut nothing that was not already hers. He pointed at the red silk ribbon sewn around her bundle, where one word ran in stitched letters that leaned against each other like tired men. "And that? A thief's word, or a clever child's?" "Both," she said. "I have brought nothing across but my hands and my mother's tools."

A loose green thread had snagged on the gate post as she passed, and it hung down like a dropped line. The guard reached to pull it free, then stopped, because it had caught on his own cuff too. She took the scissors from his hand, snipped the thread clean at both ends, and gave him back the short piece. "Tie that to the gate," she said. "The next woman will know who to ask."

He laughed, the way men do when a small thing has outwitted them, and lifted the bar. She crossed with the river running cold beside her, the wool still tight and the scissors still sharp. Behind her the knot stayed on the gate post all that winter, green against the grey wood, until the spring floods came up and took it.