Two traditional-style colour tattoos side by side on a forearm pair, one showing sewing tools with a MAKE banner and one showing baking tools with a BAKE banner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing and baking forearm tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two matching forearm tattoos sit side by side. The left shows scissors, buttons, a thread spool, a measuring tape and pins above a banner reading MAKE, and the right shows a whisk, a rolling pin and a mixing tool above a banner reading BAKE, with pink flowers and leaves. Bold black outlines and solid fills in yellow, blue, purple and pink give a traditional look, against a plain purple border around the photograph.

Traditional Forearm Sewing Scissors Button Thread Pin Banner Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming in sideways over the Pennine market town of Haverby since the Thursday, and by the Saturday the village hall smelled of wet wool and burnt sugar. Edna Pilling had pinned her entry card to a tray of pinwheel scones before Joan Gosling from the sewing circle could get her thimble out of her handbag.

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The two of them had shared a wall for thirty-one years, the haberdashery on one side of Bridge Street and the bakehouse on the other, and a pair of tongues that never stopped talking about each other. Edna's rolling pin had been her mother's. Joan's shears had cut every bridesmaid's dress in the valley. Nobody could say who started the feud, though most agreed it began over a jar of lost buttons and a loaf that rose too far and fell on the vicar.

The judge, a retired schoolmaster with a cough, tasted the scones, then lifted a navy waistcoat from Joan's table, turned it inside out and looked at the seams for longer than was polite. In the silence Edna heard the clock over the stage tick twice. "Whoever sewed this," he said, "has never once in her life let a stitch go to waste. And whoever made these has never once let a sponge sink." He set the waistcoat down and picked up a scone. "So I'll have the pair of you do one thing together for next year, or I'll have neither of you on the committee."

The next morning there was a new hook in the brickwork between the two shops. From it hung a tea towel with a border of red thread, MAKE stitched on one end and BAKE on the other, and between the words a row of mismatched buttons that nobody in Haverby had ever managed to lose.