Line drawing flash of a ball of yarn with crochet hooks, a thimble, a spool and buttons above a CRAFTY banner, with brown and red shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crafty yarn ball flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design on paper showing a ball of yarn with crochet hooks and a knitting needle pushed into it. A spool of thread, a thimble, a sewing needle and several buttons surround it, and a scroll banner across the bottom reads CRAFTY. The bold black outlines are softened by brown and red shading on the yarn and thimble, and the design sits centrally on a pale background.

Traditional Yarn Knitting needle Spool Button Banner

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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

The wicker basket came off the 14:12 to Carlisle wedged between two folded newspapers, and by the time I logged it at the lost property hatch nobody had come asking. Inside was a ball of mustard wool the size of a grapefruit, two crochet hooks stuck through it like pins in a pincushion, a knitting needle with half a sleeve hanging off it, a brass thimble, a spool of grey thread and a tin of buttons rattling loose at the bottom.

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I am not supposed to keep things. The rule is sixty days, then the box goes to the auction house in Leeds. But at the end of each shift I found myself lifting the lid and tugging at the wool to see how far the pattern had got. Someone had counted the rows in pencil on the back of a platform timetable tucked under the tin. Forty-one rows, a cross, then forty-one again. Whoever she was, she had been stubborn about it.

On the fifty-ninth day a woman came to the hatch with her coat buttoned wrong. Before I'd even opened the box she said, "Mustard, with the hooks in it. I was going to finish the collar before my sister's wedding." She had sat on the bench by platform four, set the basket down to fetch a tea, and turned round to find the train gone. She didn't open the lid. She just held it against her chest the way you'd hold a loaf out of the rain.

At the door she asked whether the buttons were still in the tin. I tipped it for her. She picked out one brass button with four holes, turned it over, and pressed it into my palm. "For the hatch," she said. "Somebody here ought to be crafty." Then she was gone up the stairs, and I stood holding the button while the next train announced itself through the wall.