Black line flash design of two fists with HAND MADE across the knuckles, beside a spool of thread, scissors, a needle and yarn.

Hand made fists with sewing tools

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two clenched fists with the words HAND MADE across the knuckles in outlined block lettering. Surrounding them are a spool of thread, a pair of scissors, a needle and a tangle of yarn. The design uses bold black outlines and simple hatching on white, with no colour.

Lettering Fist Knuckle Lettering Spool Thread Scissors Needle Yarn

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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

The darning basket lives on the windowseat of the back parlour at Gull Rock House, and by the second week of October you have learned which lodger's socks need a heel and which need a prayer. Mrs Pargeter sets you to it every evening after the teacups are cleared, your fingers gone pink from the wash-tub, the wireless murmuring the shipping forecast from the hallway.

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Tonight it is Mr Ashdown's blue jumper, the one with the elbow worn to lace. He has been out on the breakwater since dawn, sketching crabs for a book no publisher in Margate will take, and he watches you knot the yarn with the look of a man who has never once fixed anything himself. He lifts his clenched fists off the tablecloth and grins. Hand made, he says, as if the words were a boast he'd stitched himself. You tell him the jumper was hand made too, by a woman in Whitstable who knitted it for a husband who never came home from the Scheldt, and that you are only the one who keeps it from coming apart.

When the last stitch is tied, you snip the thread with the good scissors, the ones Mrs Pargeter keeps for her own use, and he laughs at how carefully you do it. Upstairs the boarders' doors close one by one. You fold the jumper over your arm and carry it up the narrow stairs, past the room where the tide clock ticks, and leave it on his chair with the darned elbow turned outward, so the first thing he sees in the morning is the work of your two hands.