Black and grey tattoo of a pair of scissors with curling vines on the upper back, shaded to look three-dimensional.

Scissors and vines on a upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of open scissors with shaded metal handles and blades is drawn in bold black outline and grey shading. Thin black vines with grey-shaded leaf tips curl around and under the scissors on a pale, slightly pink skin surface. The design is centred on the shoulder blade area and fills most of the frame against a blurred background.

Neo-trad Back Scissors Vine Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pivot on the shears had worked loose sometime during the wet March, and Nell Harrow had meant to take them to the grinder in Bridport for a month. Now the rectory vine had reached the second-floor sill and was feeling its way under the lead flashing, and there was no more time for meaning to do things.

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The man from the estate agent's stood on the gravel with his phone held up, photographing the wall. "Just take the lot, love," he said. "Buyers want clean stone." Nell didn't argue. Her grandfather had set the first cutting against that wall in 1952, and the vine had outlived two vicars, a flood and a dog named Pilot. She opened the shears and bit into the first stem. Sap ran pale and sweet down her wrist, and the leaves shivered as if something had been startled out of them.

By noon she had cleared the lower half and reached the old iron ring hooked into the mortar. Behind it, under a tangle of dead wood, she found a wren's nest, empty, and beneath that a crack so wide she could have slid a coin into it. The vine had been holding the wall together, every tendril pulling stone toward stone. She stood back with the shears hanging from one finger and looked at the bare patch she'd made.

She cut only the brown, brittle growth that afternoon and left the green runners where they were. The man was not pleased. Nell packed the shears into her apron pocket with the blades still a little open, and when she turned to go, one young tendril had curled itself around the handle, as if asking to be kept.