Black and grey fine line tattoo of crossed knitting needles, a knitted swatch and a yarn ball with a trailing thread, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knitting needles and yarn ball

Fine line · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two knitting needles resting across a partly knitted swatch, with a dark yarn ball at the bottom from which a single thread curves up to the needles. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading giving the needles and the swatch some depth, and the yolk-like ball is filled with denser black shading. The design is set against plain skin in a simple, centred composition.

Fine line Knitting needle Yarn Thread

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

The swatch was four inches wide and I had been knitting it for three days, because the innkeeper's wife had bet me a jug of mulled cider that I couldn't finish a cable pattern before the pass reopened. The snow had come down off the moor on Tuesday and sealed the road at Hollin Cross. Since then the only company at the Drover's Rest had been a stove that smoked when the wind turned, two carters asleep by the fire, and a ball of charcoal wool that Mrs Aske kept in her apron pocket.

Keep reading

The needles were hers, borrowed from a drawer of old bone and steel that had belonged to her mother. Each time I dropped a stitch I heard her laughing from the kitchen. On the third night the lamp guttered and I lost my place entirely, and the thread ran slack from the ball, across the floorboards, under the settle, and out of sight.

I followed it on my knees. It led past boots steaming on the hearth and a sleeping dog, under the table where the carters' dice lay, and down to the cellar steps, where it ended at a small wooden door I had never noticed. Behind it was a room no bigger than a wardrobe, lined with shelves. On every shelf a swatch was pinned flat and labelled in a faded hand: the Thirsk Rib, 1791; the Harrowgate Moss; the Pass Cable, dated the winter of the great drift. Each one stopped at the same row, as if whoever had knitted it had simply walked out into the snow.

I sat on the cold step and picked up my needles. When Mrs Aske found me there at dawn she said nothing. She took the ball from my hands, wound the loose end twice round her wrist, and nodded at the window, where a plough was grinding up from the valley. I tied off my swatch at row forty-one and left it on the step for whoever came next.