Purple cross-stitch style lettering with a needle and thread tattooed across the upper back, in a lettering style.

Cross-stitch lettering with needle and thread

Lettering · Back · Colour · Photo

Purple tattoo lettering is arranged in a vertical, slightly angled line across the skin, with each letter formed from small cross-stitch marks. A needle and looping thread sit at the lower left of the lettering, completing the sewing motif. The ink is a single purple tone on a fair skin surface, with the composition filling most of the frame.

Lettering Back Needle Thread Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ferris had mended nets on the quay at Skerrow Haven since the winter her father's boat went out and didn't come back in. The loft smelt of tar and wet hemp, and the light came in grey through the slatted window, so she worked near the door where she could watch the boats come round the breakwater.

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Her mother had taught her cross stitch on a linen cloth in the front room, the kind of sampler that hung above the stove with a row of letters and a house drawn in one corner. Nell had thought it a fussy way for a girl to waste an afternoon. Now her hands did it without asking, small crosses laid over the holes of a torn mesh, each one pulled tight so the water couldn't find the gap.

The skipper's boy came up the steps on Tuesday with a split trawl and a face like he'd been crying into the salt. He asked if she could have it right by the morning tide. She told him to sit, took the purple twine from its peg because it was the only colour she had left, and stitched his net the way her mother had stitched cloth, letter by letter, one cross at a time.

At first light she watched the fleet go out past the lights with the mended trawl folded in the hold. The boy raised a hand from the stern. Nell stayed on the steps with the needle still in her fingers, and found she had been counting the crosses under her breath, the way she always had, to keep the hours moving.