Black and grey tattoo of ornate scissors with shaded blades and filigree handles across a forearm.

Ornate scissors on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of open scissors runs horizontally across the forearm, with shaded grey blades on the left and a round dark stud at the pivot. The handles are drawn as bold black filigree with looping scrollwork and open oval finger loops. The design is in black ink only, set against plain skin with a blurred indoor background.

Forearm Scissors Filigree Ornament Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook aboard the Marigold kept one pair of scissors for everything, and nobody else was allowed to touch them. Mrs Pike said they had been forged in Whitby by a smith who had lost his brother to the herring fleet, and that he had worked the handles into iron lace so that a body's fingers would have something to hold while the rest of the world tilted. She cut onions with them, bandages, and once a length of tarred twine for the boatswain, who swore she had grinned while she did it.

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The night the wind came round from the north-east, the galley lamp swung on its chain and the pots slid to the far wall. Tom, the youngest boy, was sent down to fetch bread for the watch, and he came back white to the lips. Mrs Pike did not scold him. She took the scissors from their drawer, pressed the handles into his palm, and told him to cut the loaf in thick slices and keep his elbows in. He shook so badly that the first slice came out crooked, but the scissors were patient and the second came out straight, and by the fifth he had stopped counting the waves.

When the captain came down at dawn, soaked and grey, he asked who had cut the spare mainsail patch so cleanly that the sailmaker wanted to know whose hand it was. Tom said nothing, but Mrs Pike hung the scissors back on their nail with the handles turned toward the door, open, the way she always did. She said the sea liked to see a thing ready to close, and that it would think twice before it tried anything with a crew who kept their shears so pleasantly prepared.