Close photo of a small black and grey fine line tattoo of scissors with a dashed line below it, on the top of a foot between the big toe and second toe.

Scissors and dashed line on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A foot rests on a textured carpet, showing a small tattoo of open scissors in black and grey ink. A dashed line runs down from the blades towards the toes. The linework is simple and even, and the tattoo is set against plain skin with the toes painted red.

Fine line Other Scissors Dashed line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chalk line was already drawn when Ada came up the stairs, a dashed run of white across the hem of the wedding silk, and Mr Dalby's shears lay on the cutting table where he had left them to see about his bread. She didn't pick them up at once. Her mother had always said a cut was a promise you couldn't take back, and Ada had spent three years learning to say it with her hands before she said it with her mouth.

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Thirty-one yards of ivory had come in on the Tuesday train, and the bride was a bank clerk's daughter who wanted a bodice like frost on a window. Ada laid the pattern out, pinned it, and smoothed it flat with the side of her palm. Then she followed the dashes one stitch at a time, the blades opening and closing with a sound like breath drawn through teeth. Snip, snip, along the seam allowance, past the place where a hem would fall, down to the very edge where the cloth gave up.

Mr Dalby came back up at four smelling of yeast and sugar. He ran a thumb along her cut and said nothing for so long that she began to fret. Then he took a length of thread from his waistcoat pocket, knotted it round the first pin, and told her the line was true.

She kept the shears. The chalk had rubbed off by the next morning, but the dotted path stayed in her head, and years later, when her own daughter asked what the little scissors on the cutting-room door meant, Ada said only that you measured twice and then you cut.