Black fine line tattoo of ornate scissors with scrollwork on the inside of a forearm, with a script tattoo visible on the foot.

Scissors tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a forearm with a black ink tattoo of decorative scissors, drawn with delicate linework and curling scrollwork around the handles. The blades point down towards the wrist and the shading is minimal, so the design reads as clean outline with light fill. A second tattoo of script lettering is partly visible on the top of a bare foot at the left edge of the frame, and the background is pale paving.

Fine line Forearm Other Scissors Scrollwork Script Lettering

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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

The shears were my grandmother's, and in forty years nobody had cut anything with them but cloth. She kept them in a biscuit tin on the packing-shed windowsill, where the late light came through the Bramley trees in long gold bars, and she made it plain the orchard was no place for them. So when Uncle Tom sent me up to the shed that August for his secateurs, I took the wrong pair without thinking and was halfway down the row before I noticed the curled handles knocking against my hip.

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The windfalls had been lying since Tuesday's rain, brown and wasp-bored, and the Cox's on the south wall needed picking before the blackbirds got into them. I snipped the stalks clean, one after another, the blades closing with a small sweet sound I had never heard from her sewing table. A wasp settled on the top loop and walked the scroll like a man reading small print. Mrs Pargeter from the next farm leaned on the gate and asked what I'd done to my hand, and I said nothing, because nothing was exactly what I'd done.

At dusk I carried the shears back and found Grandmother on her crate with a basket of runner beans in her lap. She held out her palm without looking up. I laid the shears across it, points down, the way you'd hand over a knife. She turned them over, tested the pivot with her thumb, and said the tin had been a mistake all these years, because scissors that never cut anything go stiff and forget what they are for. Then she snapped a bean in two, dropped the pieces in the bucket, and told me the Cox's would keep until morning.