Traditional colour tattoo of scissors, thread spools, a measuring tape and a banner reading Create on a forearm, shown beside its grey pencil design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing tools and banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A split image shows a pencil or ink line drawing of a sewing theme on the left, with the finished tattoo on a forearm on the right. The design includes scissors, thread spools, a measuring tape, pins, a pincushion and a banner reading Create. The tattoo uses bold black outlines with solid colour fills in red, orange, yellow, blue and green.

Traditional Forearm Scissors Thread Spool Pin Banner Sewing

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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

Hold the tape flat, Nell, not curled round your wrist like a bootlace. Forty-one inches at the bust, and Mrs Okafor wants the lace basted by Thursday, so keep your wandering thoughts in the pincushion with the pins. No, the tomato. Yes, that one. My mother stitched it from a Sunday cardigan the year the war ended, and it has outlasted three apprentices and a flood.

Keep reading

The bride came in last March with a sketch drawn on the back of a bus timetable. She wanted something nobody else in Hull had worn, which is a foolish thing to ask of a shop that has made the same grey coats since 1952. So I sat her down, unpicked the old blue silk my father bought off a Belgian sailor, and told her the cloth had been waiting for a better reason than funerals. We spent three evenings with the scissors singing and the thread spools rolling off the table, and she laughed every time one hit the floor.

On the morning of the wedding she stood on the box in front of the long mirror while I pinned the hem. The bus timetable was still folded in her glove. She asked me whether the dress was good enough to be worn only once. I told her it had been made to be worn, which is what the gold word over our door has always meant, though most people read it as a request.