Black and grey flash sheet of four cross-stitch style tattoo designs: lettering reading thug life, an ornate scroll, a heart with the word mom, and an anchor.

Cross-stitch style flash sheet of four designs

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four separate tattoo designs stacked vertically on a white background. Each is built from small black X-shaped marks in a cross-stitch pattern, with the top design set in lettering, a middle ornamental scroll, a heart containing the word mom, and an anchor at the bottom. The work is entirely black and grey with no colour and no body is shown.

Lettering Scroll Heart Mom Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways across the car park since seven, and Maureen Dunphy had given up on her umbrella by the time she reached her pitch under the flyover. Her stall at Hadley Street market sold haberdashery and second-hand linen, and the cloth samplers she had stitched years ago in her mother's kitchen hung along the back rail in plastic sleeves, going soft at the corners. Nobody wanted them. Nobody had wanted them for a decade, which was why she kept them.

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Her son Danny came over at eleven with two teas in paper cups and a face that said he had something to ask. He was not a boy any more. He worked on the boats out of Grimsby and smelled of diesel and cold air. He looked up at the samplers, at the rows of little black crosses her mother had taught her to count, and tapped the anchor with a wet finger. "You never finished that one," he said. "Your mum's name was meant to go under it."

She had forgotten. She took the sampler down, turned it over, and found the pencil guide still faint on the back of the linen, the letters ruled out in grid squares. Eighteen rows in, the thread had run out and she had never bought more. Danny held the cloth up against the grey light while the rain drummed on the tarpaulin, and for a while neither of them said anything.

"Give it here," she said, and sat down on an upturned crate. She threaded a needle with the last length of red cotton from her apron pocket and began counting from the top. By the time the market packed up at four, the name was stitched, every cross even, and Danny had bought the sampler for a pound and carried it home folded inside his jacket.