Black and grey realism tattoo of ornate antique scissors with scrolled handles on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate antique scissors on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a pair of antique scissors with heavily scrolled, ornamental handles and long open blades. The shading is black and grey, with fine stippled texture on the blades and dense, detailed shading on the handles. The scissors fill the upper frame against a dark background, with a partial line design visible at the lower edge.

Realism Calf Scissors Scrollwork Blade

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the lamp. No, the other one, the one that doesn't hiss. Now. You want to know why the scissors hang open above the tide-gate in the Spindle's old reliquary? My mother told it one way and her mother told it another, so you'll get the version that's kept me warm through forty winters.

Keep reading

The Spindle is a ring of cable and rust turning around nothing, and the air inside it is held there by a weave of threads older than any of us. Mother Oriel Pask was the mender. Her scissors came off a dead world's auction, with handles like twisted iron vines and blades that sang when they closed. She could cut a fraying line clean, and the ring would heal around the cut like a wound that had never been opened. Everyone else could only cut and hope.

One night a boy called Tobin Ardley came down the shaft with a severed cable across his shoulders and a lie about his age in his mouth. He was sure he could splice it himself. Oriel didn't scold him. She sat him on the crate, put the blades in his hands, and said, 'You never cut what you can't mend, love. Find me the thread that's still alive.' He searched until his fingers bled, and when he finally found it, she closed the scissors on the wrong line, the one that was only tired, and let the sound go through the ring like a bell.

The ring held. Tobin lived to be an old man himself. Oriel's scissors went on the hook above the gate, and nobody has closed them since, because every mender who came after learned what she knew: the blades stay open so that no one has to choose which thread to let go. Mind the lamp on your way out.