Realistic colour tattoo of multicoloured knitted stitches covering the upper arm and shoulder, with two knitting needles across the lower edge.

Knitted yarn sleeve on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a close-up of multicoloured knitted fabric, with each stitch shaded to show texture. Two pink knitting needles, one with a partly worked row of yarn, cross the lower edge of the design. Soft shading and a wide range of blues, greens, purples, pinks and oranges give the piece a rich, full colour palette.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Yarn Stitches Knitting needle

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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

You learned to knit the winter the lift in Harrowgate House broke for good, when the stairs became the only way up and every evening felt like a climb you hadn't agreed to. Your neighbour Mrs Okafor-Reid taught you on the landing outside flat 14, her needles clicking faster than you could follow, and she kept saying, knit it off the needle, don't fight it, the wool knows the way. You didn't believe her. The first scarf came out lumpy and the colour of wet cardboard.

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Then the bin men took the sofa from the fourth floor and left a box of oddments in the stairwell, and you carried it home because nobody else would. Forty balls of wool, every shade a bruise or a bird could be. Pinks that had been sunsets, greens that had been somebody's bathroom wall, a purple gone grey at one end. You started a sleeve of stocking stitch that first night and kept going through the power cut in March, by the light of your phone, counting rows under your breath.

By the summer the sleeve had grown past your wrist and wouldn't stop. Mrs Okafor-Reid came to the door, looked at it hanging over the banister, and said nothing for a long moment. Then she pointed at the last row, where you had dropped a stitch and carried on regardless. Leave it, she said. Everything's better with a dropped stitch in it. You looked at the little hole, bright as a coin, and for the first time since the lift stopped you didn't feel like you were climbing.