Black and grey blackwork chest tattoo of open scissors cut by a horizontal line, with clawed hands and leaf-like shapes on the shoulders and chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors and claws across a chest

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A bare chest and shoulders are shown, with the face cropped out at the chin. The central motif is a pair of open scissors on a thin horizontal line, flanked by clawed hands and sketchy, leaf-like shapes that extend onto the shoulders. The work uses bold ink linework with dense hatching and stippling in black and grey against a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Chest Shoulder Scissors Hand Claw Line Leaves Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Odile Pryce had not sharpened the big shears since spring, and the grocer on Cable Row swore she would have to pay a man to do it. Rain drummed on the awnings of Hallam Yard, and the stalls sagged under it, pears split and cabbages sweating in their crates. Odile kept her hands in her apron pocket and watched the square through the drips.

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The wire had appeared on a Tuesday, strung tight between the two posts at the market's edge, a thin black line someone had run across the walkway to hang a sign that never got hung. Every morning a gull perched on it. Men ducked beneath it with their trolleys. The council clerk said it was the florist's business, the florist said it belonged to the bakery, and the bakery said nothing at all, only kept its shutters down.

One night she took the shears from their hook and went out into the wet. The blades opened with a sound like a held breath. Halfway along the wire, a knot of old leaves had caught, and beneath them two pale claws were feeling along the line the way a thief feels along a shelf in the dark. Odile closed the blades. The wire sprang, sang once, and whipped across the square to strike the bakery shutter with a crack. The claws let go. The leaves came down slow as ash and dissolved on the cobbles into nothing but rainwater.

In the morning the stalls were dry and the square was empty of wire. Odile left the shears open on her counter anyway, the way you leave a door ajar for someone you are not yet sure will not come back.