Fine line drawing of a thread spool, dress form, dashed heart and needle joined by a single continuous thread, drawn in dark ink on a tan background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing notions in a fine line design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a thread spool on the left, a dress form in the centre, a dashed heart outline and a needle on the right. A single thin line of thread links the objects across the composition. The linework is fine and even, with light hatching on the spool, and the ink is dark brown or black on a warm tan background.

Fine line Spool Thread Heart Needle Sewing

Find an artist for this

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 dress form had come back from the loft missing one shoulder, and Ruth spent the first hour of the reunion pretending she hadn't noticed. Somebody had carried it across two counties in the boot of a Vauxhall, wrapped in a bin bag and a tartan blanket, and now it stood by the urn in the function room of the Crown like a guest nobody had invited.

Keep reading

"You still owe me a spool of green cotton," said Pauline, at her elbow, holding a glass of something pink. "Forty years, Ruth."

"Thirty-one." She turned the spool over in her handbag. She had kept it, had carried it through two house moves and a divorce, its thread gone the colour of weak tea. "I was going to bring it back."

The Home Economics room had become a nail bar in 2009, but Mrs Dunning's chalk marks still ghosted across the cutting table where someone had scrubbed too lightly. On the Friday before the summer exams, Ruth had drawn a dashed heart onto a bodice panel and sewn along the dashes until her needle ran out of thread, and nobody had told her that was a poor way to learn a seam. Nobody had told her anything about hearts. Now Pauline unwound a metre of green thread, threaded the needle they had found in the stand's drawer, and pressed it into her palm. "Go on, then. Finish the hem."

Ruth knelt on the carpet in her good trousers and drew the thread along the faded line, stitch by careful stitch, until the dashes closed into a shape she could read. Then she bit the thread off the way Mrs Dunning had taught her and tied it, and for a moment the old room seemed to hum with the sound of the machines.