Colour tattoo of stitched patchwork hexagons in red and grey with a pair of scissors, a thread spool and a pin on the upper arm.

Patchwork hexagons with scissors and thread

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sleeve-style tattoo covers the upper arm with a patchwork of grey and red hexagons, each outlined with dashed stitch lines and decorated with abstract yellow, blue, black and green shapes. Along the lower part of the arm, a pair of open scissors, a green thread spool, a pin and a looping black thread line sit on the skin. Bold outlines and flat fills give the piece a graphic look, and the image is a close, well lit view with the rest of the body cropped out.

Upper arm Hexagon Scissors Thread Spool Pin Sewing

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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, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she has been waiting on this story since Tuesday. My grandmother's people came from Hallow Skerry, a rock off the north end of the island where the wind has more say than the minister. On Hallow Skerry there was a woman called Ada Finlay who had no money for cloth, so she cut her husband's old shirts into hexagons, because a hexagon, she said, is the only shape that fits against its neighbours without wasting a thread.

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She tacked the pieces over paper templates, folded and sewn, one by one, through the long dark evenings when the lamp burned low. Grey from the shirts, red from the petticoat her sister gave up, and every seam she stitched with a dashed line, so you could always see where the work had been. Yellow for the sun that came out twice that winter. Blue for the boat that did not come back, and then did, which is the kind of thing a quilt is for.

When the fishing failed, Ada took her good scissors, the ones with the long blades that opened like a heron's beak, and walked the quilt across to the mainland to sell it. She came back with the scissors still in her apron and a little green spool of thread the shopkeeper had thrown in for nothing. He told her he had never seen a quilt where the stitching showed on purpose.

So that is why the island still has its own pattern. Nobody here hides a seam. Now, who wants the next one, and who is going to stop talking long enough to hear it?