Fine line black tattoo of a dress form wearing a bow, a dashed stitched heart and a needle with thread, on a limb.

Dress form, stitched heart and needle

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A dress form wearing a bow and a corset-style bodice with a skirt sits on the left, beside a dashed-line heart and a needle with thread trailing from its eye. The linework is fine and even, with minimal shading, in black ink on skin. The motifs are spaced across the frame with the thread looping between the dress form, heart and needle.

Fine line Other Heart Needle Thread Bow Dress Sewing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dress form came off the Thursday goods at Hollin Bridge with a black bow tied at its neck and no label to say whose it was. Porter Tom Adey carried it into the waiting room and stood it by the stove, where it wore the draught like a widow at a funeral. For three days nobody came for it.

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On the fourth morning a woman walked in from the far side of the moor, carrying a needle with a length of red thread through its eye. She said her name was Mary Lusk and that the dummy had been her mother's. Her mother had been a dressmaker in Ravensworth and had kept her pins in that same bodice for forty years. Tom asked how a dress form could ride a goods train alone. Mary only looked at the stove and said trains went wherever thread was pulled.

She sat on the bench and began to sew. She stitched a dashed heart into the hem of the station blind, and as she drew the needle through, the red thread ran out of the door, across the platform, under the rails and up the far hill to where her mother's cottage stood empty. Each stitch drew the line tighter, until the old house leaned towards them like a dress on a washing line.

When the 4.10 pulled in, Mary tied off the thread at the dummy's waist, set the needle on the bench and stepped onto the train without a ticket. In the morning Tom found the blind stitched with a heart that had one gap at its top, and the thread still trailing from the needle into the rails, wound round the signal wire. The stove stayed lit. Nobody ever asked for the dummy back.