Two small black fine line tattoos on forearms, a sewing machine on the left arm and a pair of scissors on the right arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing machine and scissors on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two separate black tattoos sit on the inner forearms of a person wearing a white top. The left arm carries an outlined sewing machine with decorative scrollwork, and the right arm carries a pair of open scissors with curled handles. The linework is clean and even, with no shading beyond solid black fill on the machine base, and the skin tone is the only other colour in the frame.

Fine line Forearm Scissors

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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 sewing machine came up from the Hollin Pit on a handcart the week after the roof fell on the low seam, and Nell Garside had to be told twice where to put it. Her husband had bought it on the tally from Pryce's shop in Ferrier Street, a black iron treadle with gold scrollwork curling up its arm. He paid for it in shifts. When he died of the black lung the tally came to her, and so did the machine, because a debt is a thing a family keeps.

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She took in work at the back of the terrace: moleskin trousers, flannel shirts, knee patches cut from old sacking. Men came at dusk with torn things over their arms and waited on the step. Her scissors hung on a nail by the window, handles curled like the horns of a ram, sharp enough to part a single strand held up to the lamp. Her mother always said a thread cut the wrong way cut the luck of the house, so Nell bit hers or pulled it clean.

The night the fire damp came up the shaft, the wives gathered on the cobbles with their shawls pulled tight. Nell stayed at the treadle and mended the shirt her son had left on the hook that morning, where it had torn on the cage. She worked until the lamp guttered. The list was chalked on the chapel door before dawn. Her son's name was not on it, because he had come up early with a cough and was asleep in the back bedroom with his boots still on.

In the morning she oiled the wheel and cut the final thread on that cuff with the ram-horned scissors, then hung them back on their nail. The boy wears that shirt to the colliery offices now, where he keeps the books. He has never asked why the stitching on the left cuff runs long and loose, a thread left for pulling through.