Colourful cross-stitch style folk pattern tattoo covering a forearm, with red, green, blue and yellow motifs outlined in black.

Cross-stitch folk pattern on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm is covered in a diamond-shaped geometric pattern that imitates cross-stitch embroidery, with stepped borders and star-like floral motifs. The linework is solid black, and the pattern is filled with red, green, blue and yellow ink on a pale skin background. The arm runs diagonally through the frame, with a person in a blue plaid shirt blurred behind it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ilona,

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The lamp has gone out twice tonight and I have relit it both times, because the diamond on the second cloth will not count itself. You know how Mama insisted on one stitch wrong in every border, so the eye has somewhere to rest. I have been sitting here trying to find where she put hers. I think it is in the third star from the left, the one with the yellow centre that always looks slightly tilted, as if it had been stitched on a moving cart.

The pattern came from the Kovalenko cloth that Uncle Petro sent when the post still ran from the station. Forty-one rows of crosses, four colours on the thread spools, and a stepped edge that climbs like a staircase to the middle. Mr Baranski at the mill says the designs were copied from church linen, that every village had its own, and that a girl was not considered married until she could stitch one without a paper to follow. I told him I would be married by the time I finished this one, and he laughed as if I had made a joke.

The cloth is nearly done and I do not know who to give it to. Father wants it on the wall of the front room. Tomasz wants it folded in the chest with the good coats, where the moths will get it. I have decided it goes to whoever comes through the gate in the spring carrying a wrong stitch of their own, and you know I mean you.

I have left the red thread loose at the back, so you can find where I began. Do not pull it. Count from there.

Your sister, Hanna

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