Black and grey sewing-themed tattoo on the side of the ribs, showing a dress form, scissors, thread spool, pin cushion, buttons and needles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sewing tools tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large sewing-themed design covers the side of the torso, with a dress form at the centre flanked by a thread spool, a pair of scissors, a pin cushion, buttons and a thimble. Linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the form and tools, and dashed stitch lines run across the composition. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the frame from top to bottom.

Ribs Sewing Scissors Button Needle

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

Mam kept the dress form in the front room between the piano and the coal bunker, because it was the only spot on Tanner's Row tall enough to stand it. Its wooden shoulders wore my father's old waistcoat on Sundays, and nobody argued about it. When the cage came up at six each morning the men came home grey to the eyebrows, and she had them out of their pit trousers and into the copper before the kettle boiled.

Keep reading

The scissors were hers from Sunderland, the blades worn thin at the tips from cutting through canvas and moleskin. She taught me the thimble first, because a needle pushed through a thumb in a cold house is a lesson you only need once. Buttons went in a tin by the window, sorted by size, and I was allowed to sort them on the days the dust was too thick for the yard.

The year the strike ran long, she sewed for the whole terrace. Pins stood out of the cushion like a hedgehog's back. Nobody paid her in coin. They paid in coal and eggs and once a whole salmon wrapped in the Chronicle. I stitched the linings and the hems that didn't matter while she did the shoulders, and her stitches ran across the cloth in dashed lines, like the tide marks on the wash-house wall.

When the pit shut, Dad went down one last time to fetch his lamp and came back with the brass check still in his fist. He didn't say anything. Mam lifted the waistcoat off the dress form, folded it once, and laid it in the tin with the buttons. Then she put the thimble in my palm. "Your turn," she said, and I've been sewing ever since.