Small black outline tattoo of scissors with a dotted cut line on the top of a foot, with red painted toenails and a fox nail design on the big toe.

Scissors tattoo on the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a small pair of open black scissors tattooed on the top of a foot, with a dotted line running down from the blades. The linework is simple and slightly uneven, with solid black ink and no visible shading. The foot rests on a textured beige carpet, and the toenails are painted red, with a small fox design on the big toe.

Other Scissors Dotted line Fox

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dotted line was Aunt Dorcas's habit, not the pattern maker's. Every tissue sheet she bought from the market stall got one drawn in carpenter's pencil before we ever touched the shears, a row of small stitches that meant cut here and no argument. We worked at the dining table of the Sandpiper, the boarding house on Marlow Parade, with the sash window propped open and the gulls quarrelling over the bins.

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Lodgers came and went with the tide. That August it was Mrs Hale, a widow from Leeds, who wanted a coat cut for her sister's wedding and would not stop fidgeting while I pinned her measurements. Dorcas laid the paper flat and smoothed it with the side of her hand. 'Scissors go where the line is,' she said, 'not where your heart fancies.' I thought it a sour thing to say about a wedding.

When I lifted the paper to start, a second line lay underneath the first, pencilled faintly and wandering off the edge of the sheet. It wasn't Dorcas's hand. Folded small inside the tissue was a receipt from a Hastings haberdasher dated 1958, and on its back, a single instruction: cut the long way, the coat needs room to breathe.

I cut the long way. Mrs Hale wore the coat to her sister's wedding and cried in it, and afterwards the shears lay open on the table, blades apart, the way Dorcas always left them when she meant to come back and finish a job.