Purple pencil sketch of crossed scissors, a comb and two roses wrapped in a ribbon, drawn as a neo-traditional tattoo design.

Scissors, comb and roses design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a pair of ornate scissors crossed with a comb, with two shaded roses and leaves on either side. A ribbon winds around the scissors blades and the rose stems. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, built up with cross-hatching and tonal pencil, and the image is drawn in a single purple ink on a pale background.

Neo-trad Botanical Scissors Rose Ribbon Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Gwyn Pryce had swept the lino twice before the bell over the door rang at half seven, and Dilys came down from the flat above to find him at the window, turning his late father's scissors so the light ran down the blades. "Selling them?" she asked. "Using them," he said. "Selling them after."

Keep reading

The shop on Gloucester Road had come to him with a tin bath of rose bushes out the back, the only thing his father had planted that had not died of neglect. Every Friday for eleven years Mrs Hale had come in for a set and a trim, and every Friday she left a single bloom in a jam jar on the counter beside the combs soaking in blue disinfectant. Three Fridays now without her.

On the fourth, Gwyn walked the length of Hale Street with the scissors wrapped in green ribbon from the till drawer. Her front door was open and he could hear the kettle. She sat at the kitchen table with a pair of kitchen shears and a hank of her own grey hair, and the cut was wrong on one side, badly. "I was going to come in," she said. "I was going to come in on Friday."

He didn't mention the ribbon. He turned her chair to the window, combed the hair straight, and took the cut back to where it had been, slowly, while the kettle went cold. When he finished, she held the hand mirror up and laughed, and the jam jar on her sill had a rose in it again, a little wilted, which was how he knew she had been waiting too.