Drawn tattoo design of ornate scissors wrapped in a teal ribbon, with pink peonies and leaves, in a neo-traditional style with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors, ribbon and peonies design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of an ornate pair of scissors crossed over two pink peony flowers, with a teal ribbon winding around the blades and loops above. Grey pencil-like linework and stippled dotwork shade the leaves, petals and scissor handles, while the flowers and ribbon are filled with soft pink, red and teal colour. The composition is a tall, centred arrangement on a plain light background.

Neo-trad Dotwork Scissors Ribbon Peony Flower Leaves

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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

Sit down, sit down, you'll not get the lift today, it's been broke since Whitsun. Come up the stairs with me instead and I'll tell you about the scissors on the fourteenth floor of Harcourt House, because nobody else alive remembers them right.

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Their owner was Ada Pryce, who ran alterations from a room the size of a wardrobe, and she had a pair of silver shears her late husband had bought off a Huddersfield pawnbroker for two shillings and a promise. Every morning she oiled them, and every evening she wrapped them in a teal silk ribbon so the children on the landing would not run onto the points. Peonies grew in old paint tins on the balcony, pink as a boiled sweet, and she'd pick one each Friday and put it in the jar by the till, where the sewing machine hummed like a fly against glass.

Then the council sent men to clear the stairwell, and Ada's little shop was next on the list. A girl called Priya came up with a wedding dress that needed taking in, sixteen inches of satin, and the wedding was on Saturday. Ada took one look at the ribbon, unwound it, and cut the dress to fit with such care that the girl cried. "The ribbon's for luck," Ada said, "not for keeping. You tie it on the thing you're about to set free."

Ribbon went round the blades again, loop after loop, and the shears went back in their drawer. The men cleared the stairwell that month and the building came down the year after. But I've seen the photograph Priya kept, the dress hanging on a hook in a hall full of people, and in the corner of it, bright as anything, one teal loop still tied to the door handle.