Colour tattoo in a cross stitch style showing a pink and white motif with green and navy sprigs, shown in close-up and on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross stitch style tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The collage shows a cross stitch style tattoo, with a pink and white motif above a border of green and navy sprigs and leaves. The design is built from small X-shaped marks in flat colour rather than conventional linework, with no visible shading. The two close-up photos on the left fill the frame, while the right photo shows the smaller design on a forearm against a dark jumper and a leather surface.

Forearm Sprig Leaves Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, pull that stool closer, the pair of you, and mind the bean canes. This is about Mary Tallow, who kept the cottage at the bottom of Chapel Lane, and the sampler she left behind, which hung on a nail by the back door for forty years after she was gone.

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She stitched it the winter the Ashby brook came over the lane and took the wall with it. Every morning that January she went out with her basket and found something else gone: a row of sweet peas, a gatepost, the bench where the postman rested his legs. So she sat by the range with a square of linen and her red and white cotton, and she put back what the water had taken, one small cross at a time. Pink for the flower that came up under the hedge every May, white for the frost on the sill, and green for the sprigs she could still count on her fingers when she was tired.

Folk laughed at her. Who stitches a garden when the garden's in the ditch? But when the water went down, the men cut new stakes from the same ash trees, and somebody remembered where the gate had been, because it was on Mary's cloth, with a navy thread marking the corner. They built the wall back to the line she had made.

The last thing she did was unpick one cross in the top corner, the one above the little pot of pink, and leave the hole open. When I asked her why, she said a garden ought to have room for something to get in. Mind your feet on the way out; the bees are at the lavender.