Black script lettering reading Passion and Love with a pair of scissors tattooed across the fingers of a hand.

Passion and love with scissors on fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown with the word Passion in black script across the top of one finger and Love in black script on the next finger, with a line drawing of a pair of open scissors beside it. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no colour. The hand fills the right side of the frame against a dark grey leather surface.

Lettering Fine line Hand Love Scissors Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the pins on the floor, because old Mrs Ackroyd never swept after nine and I'll not have you bleeding over her hems. Now. Back in the winter of 1951, when the gasworks still coughed over Holbeck, there was a tailor on Lady Lane called Abel Venn, and he had a pair of shears that had been his father's and his father's before that.

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Abel cut cloth for the whole street. Sailors' wool, widows' black, a wedding suit for a cab driver who couldn't afford one. Every Saturday night he sat under the single lamp with chalk in his teeth and talked to those shears as if they were a dog that understood him. Passion, he told them, is what you put into a seam. Love is what you leave out so the wearer can breathe. And the shears only ever answered with that clean snick, snick, like a door shutting politely.

Then one night a girl came up the stairs with a torn coat and no money, and asked him to mend it for nothing. He said no, because he was a tailor and not a saint. She sat on the bench and waited anyway, rain running off her hat, until at last he picked up the needle. By dawn the coat was whole, and the shears had cut her a lining from his own wedding suit, which nobody had ever worn.

Here is the turn, and then I'll let you go home. The shears were never really cutting cloth. They were cutting the thread between a man and his wife, who had gone to Hull on the early train and never come back. Abel knew it. The girl knew it. So mind the pins, and don't go snipping what you can't mend.