Three forearms show cross-stitch style tattoos: a pink rose, a Stormtrooper helmet and a small floral motif, with a colourful elephant on a second arm and a red heart on a wrist.

Cross-stitch tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image is a stacked collage of three photographs. The top panel shows three forearms with a pink and green rose, a grey and black Stormtrooper helmet and a small red motif above leaves, all built from x-shaped stitches. The middle panel shows a multicoloured elephant made of pastel cross stitches on the forearm, and the bottom panel shows a single red heart of cross stitches on a wrist beside a red bracelet.

Forearm Rose Stormtrooper Elephant Heart Leaves Flower

Find an artist for this

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

Marguerite had mended the big top for thirty-one winters, and she could tell a sound seam from a weak one by ear alone. This March the canvas had split in three places above the menagerie ring, and Bessie, the old elephant, had started leaning against the rail as though standing had become a chore.

Keep reading

Lionel Vance wanted everything patched before the bank man came up the lane. So Marguerite sat in the wardrobe wagon with a lamp turned low and a tin of faded silks, working sequins back onto a costume skirt in cross stitches of rose and sage. Her mother had taught her that a cross was only two lines agreeing to meet, and that you counted threads rather than guessing. Teddy, the strongman's boy, brought her tea in a chipped mug and watched the needle without speaking.

On the last night before the sale she stitched a blanket for Bessie, a grey woollen square worked with an elephant in pastel crosses: blue ears, pink tusks, a green road running beneath its feet. It was the only thing on the lot anybody had chosen for beauty alone. When the bank man came with his clipboard he walked past the wagons and the empty lion cages and stopped at the elephant, reading the price off his ledger as if it were a sum he could fold away.

Lionel signed the papers in the morning. Marguerite did not argue. She tied off the last cross at dawn, lifted the blanket over Bessie's back, and watched the sun catch the coloured threads as the old animal walked slowly past the ropes into the wet field, the stitched elephant riding on her, small and bright against a grey morning.