Pencil drawing of open scissors with a scalloped-edged bow, shaded in black and grey, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors and bow pencil design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of open scissors with their blades passing through the centre of a large bow with scalloped, lace-like edges. The loops and blades are shaded in soft grey with smooth gradients and fine dark outlines. The drawing is in black and grey on a textured grey background with a dark vignette border.

Traditional Scissors Bow Ribbon Lace Pencil drawing

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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

Mrs Haskett leaves the ribbon on the back step before the gulls are up, folded twice and damp with the night's fog. You know from its weight that the Dunmore sisters have given up on it, so you carry it up the servants' stairs to the sewing room under the roof, where the window rattles against the wind off the harbour.

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The bow is wider than both your hands. Someone has pinned its lace edge with tiny stitches, each scallop a little tooth biting the cloth, and the centre is knotted so tightly the satin puckers around it. You lay the shears beside it. They are the good pair Mrs Haskett keeps in a drawer lined with flannel, and you open them once just to hear the blades meet with their clean, expensive click.

Nobody in the house asks what becomes of the things guests leave behind, and you have learned not to ask either. The tin on the top shelf holds forty years of ribbons cut free of hats and gloves and christening gowns, and not one of them ever went home again. You set the blades through the middle where the knot is hardest and think of the sisters at breakfast, pretending the storm had not torn their Sunday best from the rail.

The blades close. The bow falls into two soft halves on the green baize, lace side up, and for a moment they look like a pair of wings someone meant to fly. You fold them into the tin, lid down, and go back to the mangle before the porridge is cold.