Black and grey tattoo of ornate scissors with scrolled handles on the inside of a forearm, worn beneath a wrap bracelet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate scissors on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a pair of open scissors with a ribbon-like blade section and filigree scrolls forming the handles. The linework is dark and clean, with soft grey shading on the ribbon-like shapes and the inner blades. The arm is photographed against a plain white wall, with the tattoo centred in the lower half of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Scissors Scroll Ribbon Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you lot at the back, stop passing that tin of boiled sweets about, because this is the bit about Mrs Ada Pell and her scissors. Forty years she kept them in a biscuit tin under the counter of the haberdasher's on Mill Lane, and nobody was allowed to touch them but her. The handles curled like bracken fronds, all scroll and swirl, and the blades were thin as the ribbon on a cake box. Her husband had bought them off a travelling man at Wakefield fair for the price of a sheep.

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The year the Harvest Dance was cancelled, the girls from the Grammar came in wanting their dresses let out, and one of them, a tall lass called Winifred Kell, asked Ada to cut a ribbon the length of the church aisle. Ada said she'd cut nothing that wasn't paid for. So Winifred paid in buttons, then in a silver thimble, then in a promise to sing at the wedding. Ada cut that ribbon in one clean pull, the way you'd close a book, and handed back the scraps wrapped in tissue.

Here's the turn. Thirty years on, the same Winifred stood up at the school reunion in the parish hall, grey-haired and loud, carrying a shoebox. Inside was the ribbon, folded into a square and yellowed at the edges, every snip still in it. She said she'd never managed to throw away a clean cut. Ada had died the winter before, and the scissors were back in the tin, still sharp enough to split a hair, waiting for someone brave enough to ask for them.