Fine line tattoo of a sewing needle with a teal eye and a trailing black thread, on the inner forearm.

Sewing needle and thread on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two teal-coloured sewing needles, one above the other, with a single black thread looping from the eye of the lower needle and curving down across the forearm. The linework is thin and even, with the needles filled in teal and the thread left as an unshaded black line. The pale skin and plain white background keep the focus on the design, which is placed on the forearm and runs diagonally toward the bottom left of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Thread Needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The year the river flooded the lower meadow, Mabel Quirk came back to Thornbury for the reunion of the girls who had left the village school in 1961, and nobody was pleased to see her. She had brought a tin of her mother's shortbread and a sewing basket she had not meant to bring. Inside it lay two teal-handled needles and a spool of black thread, which she had kept since the summer she and Ruth Hebden had mended the church banners together.

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The headmistress's daughter, Joan Fairley, had run the reunion as she ran everything, with a clipboard and a face like a shut door. She looked at the tin, then at the basket, and said the hall was for the living. Mabel said she supposed the living would need something to hem their skirts with, and set her needles out on the trestle table like two small fish.

Ruth had been dead eleven years. Her name was on the list anyway, ticked in someone's careful hand. Mabel threaded the first needle without her glasses, the way Ruth had taught her, drawing the black line through the eye in one pull, and began to stitch the torn corner of the faded banner that hung above the stage. The old women watched. Joan watched longest. Then Joan fetched a needle of her own from her handbag, and sat down, and the thread ran between them across the table, from one hand to the other, until the hem was whole and nobody could say where the mend began.