Cross-stitch on white fabric in a dark frame showing traditional tattoo motifs: a red heart with a LOVE banner and dagger, and an anchor wrapped in rope with stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross-stitch heart, dagger and anchor flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A framed cross-stitch on white aida fabric shows two traditional tattoo-style motifs. On the left, a red heart with a grey LOVE banner and a dagger, and on the right, an anchor wrapped in yellow rope with small red stars. The stitched pixel outlines and flat fills in red, green, yellow and grey give the piece a classic old-school flash look.

Traditional Heart Dagger Banner Love Anchor Rope Star

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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 monitor in side room six had started its thin complaint before you reached the corridor, and you were already counting breaths when the door swung shut behind you. Mr Pryce had one hand clamped on the bed rail and the other working at the cord of his pyjama bottoms, as if he meant to tie himself to the mattress. He had been a bosun on coasters out of Hull for forty years, and he did not mind being ill so much as being stuck indoors with nothing to hold.

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You knelt, took his wrist, and said the things you always say: slow in, slower out, nobody is going anywhere tonight. The rhythm came down by degrees, like a reef showing at low tide. By four his daughter had gone to sleep in her car, and you were alone with the picture she had left on the day room table. It was a cross-stitch in a wooden frame, two small designs on white aida: a red heart pinned with a dagger, a grey banner across it reading LOVE, and beside it an anchor bound in yellow rope with red stars scattered round its flukes. Every stitch was tight. Someone had sat up with it for weeks.

Tucked under the frame was a note in biro. For whoever is on nights. He wanted something steady to look at, so I thought of you. You read it twice, pinned it to the board by the kettle, and went back to his bed. He was asleep now, his hand open on the blanket, the cord hanging loose from its knot.

Grey light came up over the car park while you logged the obs. Outside, the first bus of the day pulled in with its lights still on, and the anchor in the day room held its rope fast against nothing at all, patient and unhurried, waiting for the tide to turn.