Black and grey tattoo of ornate scissors with scrolled filigree handles on the forearm.

Ornate scissors tattoo on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of ornate, vintage-style scissors with scrolled filigree handles and pointed blades. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading in the blades and scrollwork. The tattoo sits centrally on a forearm, with a t-shirt, a bare foot and household items at the edges of the frame.

Forearm Scissors Filigree Scroll Ornament

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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

Your grandmother's scissors hang on a nail by the door of the fourteenth floor flat, and you have never taken them down without hearing her tongue click against her teeth. Mr Okafor's son has come round to ask whether you'll take in his wedding suit, and you tell him Tuesday, though you have not held a needle since the lift broke in March. The stairwell smells of wet concrete and somebody's fried onions. Beyond the window, cranes turn over the new estate like slow herons.

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The scissors came from a tailor on Cable Street, bought with a week's wages in 1961, their handles scrolled like ironwork gates. She told you to cut with the points and never the heels, because blades forgive a crooked seam but not a dull one. So you sharpen them on the back step with a whetstone wrapped in a tea towel, the grey steel whispering of... no, humming softly, while the boy from flat nine kicks a ball against the bin store and counts every kick aloud.

Then, folded inside the lining of her old coat, you find a pattern cut from brown paper, a man's name pencilled in one corner. It is not your grandmother's name. Beneath it runs a row of measurements that match nobody in the block. You sit on the stairs with the paper across your knees until the light in the stairwell clicks off on its timer and leaves you in the dark.

On Tuesday you pin the suit on Mr Okafor's son, kneeling on the lino while he talks about the reception hall. You lay the cloth flat, sight down the chalk line, and close the blades in one clean stroke. The filigree catches the strip light as the fabric falls away in two pieces, and you keep cutting, steady as she taught you, thinking of that stranger's name and wondering who in this building has been waiting for a suit that was never made.