Black and grey dotwork traditional tattoo of crossed scissors wrapped in two banners with lettering, placed on the outer thigh.

Scissors and banners on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of open scissors runs vertically across the thigh, wrapped by two banner scrolls that carry lettering in capital letters. The linework is bold and dark, with the scissor blades and banner shadows built up with stippled dotwork. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, filling most of the frame with a plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red silk was already halfway through the left blade when the quarrel started again. Maud had carried the spool home from the market in Dunmore, and her father's shears, which had hung on the same nail above the bench for forty years, had opinions about it. They were a pair, joined at the pivot, and they had cut cloth side by side for so long that neither could remember a time when one was not leaning on the other.

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Between them ran the thread. It came off the spool on the sill, through the eye of a bent needle, and wound round both blades in two tight coils, so that every time one opened, the other was tugged along behind it. "What comes between us," said the left blade, "is that thread and your slow hand." The right blade said nothing, because a blade cannot say much, but it bit down a little harder and the silk gave a small sound, like a breath let out.

Maud's grandmother, who was not dead yet and had no patience for either of them, took the pair from the nail and carried them out to the yard. She drew the thread free, unwound it one coil at a time, and laid the shears on the chopping block with their points touching. The left blade made a noise of complaint. The right blade made no noise at all.

By evening the old woman had wound the red silk round both blades once more, tight as a bandage, and tied it off so they could not part. She hung them crossed over the kitchen door, where they still hang. Nobody in the house has ever tried to pull them apart, and the cloth that comes off that bench is cut clean.

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