Black and grey tattoo of ornate scissors crossing a straight razor, with soft smoke shading behind them, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors and razor with smoke

Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pair of open scissors with scrolled, ornamental handles crossing a straight razor, with soft grey smoke shading behind them. The linework is dark and defined, with greyscale shading on the blades and handles to give them depth. The design is rendered in black and grey on skin, centred in the frame with a dark vignette around the edges.

Scissors Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke came first, as it always did when old Mrs Pryce burned her husband's shirts in the yard, and by the time I had the kettle on the whole of Church Row smelled of scorched linen. Mr Haddow stood at the window with his strop over one shoulder, pretending not to watch the lane for the Ferris boy. The boy had sworn on his mother's grave that he would come back for the cut he had walked out on, and Mr Haddow had sworn back that if he did, he would have the lad's ears for a fringe.

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Between the two of them, the shop had been a quarrel for thirty years. Haddow held that a straight razor was the only honest tool in the trade, and that scissors were for women who wanted their hair to look persuaded. Nell, Mrs Pryce's granddaughter, who cut hair on the far side of the wall and sent her customers round to us for shaves, said scissors were the only tool that could tell a story with a bit of curl in it. Neither had won. The silver-handled pair hung on a nail above the mirror, the razor lay folded in its case beside the basin, and neither had been moved in a decade.

The boy came in at four, smelling of the river, his collar already loosened. He sat without a word. Haddow lathered him, drew the blade down one cheek and then the other, and when he was done he wiped the steel on the towel and held it out to me. 'Your turn,' he said. My hands were not steady. Nell watched from the doorway with her arms folded and the scissors open in one fist, the way she held them when she was ready to argue.

I took the razor. Nell took the scissors from her grandmother's nail, closed them with a click and laid them across the blade on the glass shelf, the scrolls catching the last light through the smoke still drifting at the window. Nobody said who had won. The boy, who had not stopped staring at the lane, finally asked for a trim.