Cross stitch style flower in red, white and dark blue with green stems tattooed on a forearm, shown in close and wide views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross stitch style flower on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A collage of three photographs shows a flower motif built from small X-shaped stitches, with red and white petals, dark blue accents and green leafy stems curving beneath it. The two left images are close-ups of the upper forearm, where the stitches look crisp and evenly spaced. The right image is a wider view of the arm, with the tattoo small against the forearm and a dark sweater and leather chair in the background.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell's grandmother never finished anything she started, except the tablecloth. It hung over the back of the settee in the front room in Ashby Street for forty years, a square of linen cross-stitched with red tulips that had white centres and green stems that ran off the edge where the thread gave out. Nell counted the crosses once, as a child, while her gran was at the sink. There were four thousand and eleven. She remembered the number because it was the only sum her gran ever admitted to getting wrong.

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When the mill closed in the spring of the strike, the women of the street met in the back room of the Co-op to decide what to do with their hands. Someone suggested a raffle. Someone else pointed out that nobody would buy raffle tickets from people who had nothing to spare. So they stitched instead, one flower each, and sold the squares at the church bazaar for whatever a shilling was worth that year. Gran's flower came out crooked, she always said, because she had been crying into the linen, and she sold it anyway to a man from the council who never asked where it came from.

Years later the tablecloth came to Nell in a cardboard box with a note in pencil: keep the blue thread for the bit that goes wrong. She still has the box. The morning she finally took a needle to a fresh square of linen, she found the blue skein at the bottom, and the first flower she copied was the crooked one, cross by cross, until its petals stood straight.