Black and grey scissors with a pink bow tied around the blades, a small traditional style tattoo on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors and pink bow on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a pair of open scissors with a pink ribbon bow wrapped around the blades. The scissors have bold dark outlines and grey shading, while the bow is filled with flat pink and light highlights. The design sits centred on the limb against a plain skin background.

Traditional Upper arm Scissors Bow Ribbon

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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

The pink ribbon is still knotted round the cane when you reach the bottom of the allotment, faded at the loops from a winter in the shed. Your father tied it there the summer before the hospital, the way he tied every parcel he ever wrapped, with a bow that never sat quite flat. You stand with the shears open in your hand and the blades catching the low sun, and you do not yet cut.

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Mrs Okonedo from the next plot leans over the hedge with a trug of runner beans. "It's wanted for the sweet peas," she says. "They're climbing the wrong way again." You tell her they're fine. You tell her the ribbon is not in the way. She looks at you the way the whole village has looked at you since March, then she goes back to her beans without another word, and the wind lifts the bow so it moves like something breathing.

You work the blades slowly, the way he taught you, pivot pin first, never closing them on the thick stems. The first snip goes through the satin with a sound like a held breath let out. You pull the loose end free and fold it into your pocket. Then you take the second cut, and the third, and the bow drops into the soil among the bean stalks, a small pink thing nobody will ever need to tie again.

You knot a new length of green twine round the cane, a plain knot with no pretence at a bow. It holds. The canes stand straight, and the sweet peas begin, very slowly, to climb.