Black and grey sewing machine, dress form and buttons with a red flower and a banner reading POR VIDA, tattooed on a forearm, in a traditional style.

Sewing machine and dress form on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey sewing machine sits above a banner with the words POR VIDA, with a dress form, a row of buttons and a partial spool outline below. A red and teal flower adds the only strong colour near the banner. The shading is smooth and the linework is bold, arranged down the length of the forearm against a plain skin background.

Traditional Forearm Button Banner Text Flower Spool

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The removal men had the treadle machine strapped to a trolley before I'd found my glasses, and by the time I got downstairs it was already out on the wet pavement with its gold lettering flaking off. Mr Okafor from the cobbler's stood over it with his hands in his coat pockets, as if it might get up and bite somebody. 'Mind the wheel,' I said, though it was the wheel that had always minded me. Thirty-one years it had lived under the front window, and the thread still ran through it in the same green I'd bought the week Stan proposed.

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The dress form stayed with me. Mrs Dunn, Stan called her, because she had a stern bust and no opinions. He'd painted the ribbon along the bobbin case himself, two words in a sign-writer's red, after a sailor in Hull showed him a design he couldn't stop talking about. Por vida, it said. He never did learn the Spanish, and I never corrected him, because he meant it the way he meant everything, all at once and without a second coat. The buttons went into the tins with the rest of his coat buttons, the brass ones off the navy suit and the horn ones he cut from a box of cards at Sunday tea.

The boy who bought the machine wanted it for a flat with bare brick walls. He asked if the treadle worked and I showed him, pumping my foot the way you'd walk a dog that knows the route. He didn't ask about the buttons, so I gave him one tin for free and told him to look for the little silk rose stitched inside the lid, which was Stan's first ever piece of tailoring, a christening gown he got wrong and I fixed.

That evening I hemmed a skirt on Mrs Dunn for no one at all, just to feel the needle go in and out. The cotton was the green from the spool, and when I bit it off I found the end was still knotted the way he used to tie it, a neat little loop that wouldn't come undone however hard you pulled.