Traditional style colour tattoo of a black sewing machine with a spool and three red roses with green leaves, on a patch of skin at the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing machine and roses in traditional style

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black sewing machine with yellow accents and a red thread spool sits above a cluster of three red roses with green leaves and dark outlines. A small rosebud is placed between the machine and the roses. The bold black linework and flat, saturated red, green and yellow fills are typical of traditional American tattooing, and the design is arranged to fill the skin in a rounded composition.

Traditional Other Rose Rosebud Leaves Spool Thread

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the lane since Tuesday, so the carrier's cart stayed at the bottom of the hill and the sheets came to me instead. Mrs Pargeter at the Hollin Arms wanted forty pillowslips turned and mended before the coaching party arrived, and she wanted them done by the kitchen fire, where the treadle would not wake the guests. I set my mother's Singer on the scrubbed table beside the window and fed the first slip under the foot.

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By the third night the machine had become a kind of clock. The needle rose and fell, the bobbin ticked, and the red cotton on the spool ran down a little each hour, so I could tell the time by how much of it was left. Pargeter's boy kept bringing me tea I did not drink. He asked what I was stitching when there was nothing left to stitch, and I told him roses, because my grandmother always said a seamstress who could not make a rose could not be trusted with a hem.

On the fourth morning a traveller came down with a wool coat split at the shoulder and a face like the weather outside. He wanted it mended before the road cleared, and he would not say where he was bound. I offered to darn it plain. He asked instead for three roses, red as the spool, with a bud tucked between them like a secret he had not yet decided to tell. So I stitched them in the grey light while the snow kept falling past the glass.

When the lane opened, the coat was gone from its peg and a silver shilling lay on the table where the machine had stood. I never learned his name. But in the spring, when the carriers came up the hill, the first thing they carried in was a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with red cotton, addressed to the seamstress at the Hollin Arms in a hand I did not know.