Purple pencil sketch of crossed scissors, a comb, a ribbon and two roses, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors, comb and roses design sketch

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a pair of scissors crossed with a comb and a ribbon that wraps around the scissor blade, with two shaded roses at the upper left and lower right. The linework is fine and sketched, with soft hatching and shading on the petals and leaves. The image is a single purple tone on pale paper, with no body part visible.

Botanical Scissors Rose Ribbon Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scissors had come from my mother's workbox, and the abbot had never once asked where a monk got such fine steel. Brother Hob sat on the stool by the cloister door with his knees drawn up and his eyes screwed shut, and I told him a barber's cut is only as good as his patience. The comb went through his hair first, slow and fine-toothed, the way Brother Oswin taught me before he left for the Charterhouse with nothing but his prayer book and that old comb in his sleeve.

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Oswin had also left a blue silk ribbon coiled in the drawer, faded to the colour of a bruise going yellow. I never learned whose it was. I wound it round the shank of the scissors one winter because the steel was cold to hold and the silk kept my fingers warm. Hob opened one eye and asked if the ribbon was for him. I told him it was for the roses. The old bed under the north wall had gone wild, and every Friday I cut the best blooms for the altar and left the thorny canes for the bees.

When I finished, Hob's head was clean and pale as a peeled almond, and he touched it with both hands like a man checking a bell for cracks. He asked whether it hurt to cut something that would only grow back. I said the hair had no feelings, only the one holding the scissors did. He went out into the frost with his hood bunched in his fist.

That evening I unwound the ribbon, tied it round the last rose on the sill, and left the scissors open in the drawer with the blades facing the window, the way Oswin always did so nothing would be sharp by accident.