Black and grey traditional style tattoo of scissors, a bow-tied bundle of yarn, buttons and rope border on the upper arm, shown in two side by side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scissors, yarn and buttons on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pair of open scissors crossed in front of a bundle of yarn tied with a bow, with a few buttons and rope-patterned borders around the design. The linework is bold and dark, with greyscale shading on the scissor blades, yarn and bow to give them volume. The image is a split view: the left panel shows the shaded tattoo and the right panel shows a lighter, darker-contrast view of the same design on the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Scissors Yarn Bow Button Rope Sewing

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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 keeper's wife had no use for the lamp itself. She cared for the rope. Every autumn the sea took a little of the harbour's line, and every winter she sat at the window of the cottage below the tower with the old scissors open on her knee, cutting the frayed ends clean and binding them with waxed twine so the boats could tie up without the strands giving way.

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One November the wind came off the water with a sound like a dog at a door, and the lamp went dark at midnight because the wick had soaked through. Her husband Tam climbed the stair to relight it and did not come down for an hour. When he did, he had a bundle of pale yarn in his coat pocket, wet through, pulled from a snag on the rocks below the tower. Tied round it was a bow of blue ribbon, and caught in the knot were four horn buttons, the kind a fisherman's wife sews onto a wool jersey.

She knew the buttons. They had come off the jersey of Callum Reid, who had gone out in the spring and never returned. She said nothing of it. She unpicked the bow with the scissors, one loop at a time, and wound the yarn onto the spindle by the fire, and by morning the sea had quieted and the lamp was burning steady.

After that she knitted a jersey through the long nights, though she had no one to give it to. When the boats came in she counted them, and when the count came short she walked down to the harbour with a button in her palm and waited on the quay until the last hull was tied fast.