Small colourful tattoos of scissors, a spray can and a spool of thread on a pair of forearms, emerging from torn pink paper.

Household object tattoos on two forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms and open palms emerge through torn holes in a pink paper backdrop. The left forearm has small motifs of orange scissors, a red object, a spray can and a blue spiral, and the right has a striped rainbow object resembling a cutting board beside a spool of blue thread. The thin, flat linework is filled with bright colour, and the centred, symmetrical composition sits against the pink background.

Forearm Scissors Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now pull your chair in close, because this is about the stairwell at Holloway Court, and the sixteen floors of things people borrowed from one another long before the lift ever broke. Mrs Adeyemi on the ninth floor kept a rule taped inside her door: whatever leaves this flat comes back the same day, sharpened if it was scissors, washed if it was a board. Nobody argued with her. Nobody could afford to.

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Then in the wet spring a boy called Tomasz from the fourteenth floor needed a costume for his sister's school play. He wanted to be a painter's brush, which made no sense to anybody but him. So he went down the stairs with a borrowed spray can under his jumper, a spool of blue thread wound round his thumb, and a cutting board tucked in the crook of his elbow, because he had decided a painter needed a palette and the board would do. He knocked on every door on the way.

The scissors came from the twelfth floor. The hair dryer came from a woman who wanted it back before her Sunday shift, and the coil of coloured wire he twisted himself on the landing while the lift sat silent beside him. He cut and stitched and sprayed until the flat smelt like a paint shop, and the thread never once tangled.

The play was on a Thursday. Nobody remembers what he wore. What they remember is that on Friday morning Mrs Adeyemi found her board hung back on its hook, striped in rainbow paint, and the spool of blue thread wound back with one extra turn around it, as if the boy had wanted to leave something behind.