Black ink tattoo of a pair of scissors decorated with scrolls, leaves and a small flower, sitting on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors with floral flourishes on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of open scissors with ornamental scrollwork, leaf shapes and a small flower at the pivot, with curling swirls spreading from the blades. The linework is solid black with areas of fill and fine detail, and there is no colour. The tattoo is centred on the forearm against a plain light background.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Scissors Flourish Scroll Leaf Flower Swirl

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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

Mind the guy rope, and don't lean on the cake stall, it's been mended with string since Whitsun. Now, you want the scissors story. Every fair has one pair of shears that gets passed from hand to hand like a bad penny, and these ones came off a barrow in Lincolnshire the wet summer of nineteen-twelve, when a seamstress called Ada Thorne was paid in ribbon to fit the strongman's costume.

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Ada had a rule. She would cut nothing that could not be made to bloom. So when the strongman's wife brought her a dead man's lace collar and asked her to snip it down to nothing, Ada opened the blades wide, wound a vine of silver thread around the pivot, and set a little brass flower there. The lace came away in leaves. The collar was never grieved over again, and people walked in from three counties to look at it.

But the scissors had a habit. Whenever somebody lied under the big top, the blades would drift apart on the trestle table, slow as a gate swinging open, and curls of pale paper would spill from between them like smoke. Ada's apprentice, a boy called Tom Greaves, learned this the hard way the night he swore he'd never touched the cash box. The blades opened, the paper curled, and by morning the takings were back in the tin with a folded note in Tom's own handwriting.

They still sit on the cake stall, if you look. Closed tight, with that brass flower at the pivot, and a smudge of ink on one blade where a boy once rested his thumb.