Neo-trad style tattoo of a pair of open scissors with grey shading, black outlines and small red detail, on the back.

Scissors with sparkle dots

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A pair of open hairdressing scissors is drawn in bold black outlines with grey shading that gives the blades and finger rings a metallic look. Small black dots and star-like flecks scatter around the scissors, and a small patch of red appears inside one of the finger rings. The design sits diagonally across smooth skin with a plain, soft background.

Neo-trad Back Scissors Sparkle Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Beyond the ford, where the walls of Harrowmere had fallen in on themselves, lived a widow called Agnes Tull who mended sails for the boats that came up the river. She kept her shears in a leather roll under the stones of the old chapel, because the wind never reached there and the iron did not rust.

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Each winter the sky over the castle grew too crowded. The old lord had once hung the night with silver nails so the stars would stay put, and when the nails rotted, the stars slid loose and drifted down into the bracken, where they lay in the grass like sparks in a cold hearth. Children who walked the ruin came home with their pockets full of grit that shone for an hour and then went dull.

One January Agnes climbed the broken tower with her scissors and a lamp. She snipped the loose stars from the cold air, one by one, the way she trimmed thread from a hem, and dropped them into her apron. Each cut made a small sound like a bird landing. By dawn she had gathered forty of them, and the sky above Harrowmere was dark and quiet and easy to see through.

The lord's grandson came up the stairs at noon, sulking about his missing hunting dogs, and found her sitting on the parapet with the scissors open across her knees. 'You cut them down,' he said. She told him the stars were only loose threads, and that the sky needed tidying the way anything did. He asked what she wanted for her trouble. She shook out her apron. 'Nothing you have,' she said, and went down to her boat.