Black and grey tattoo on the upper arm of a silhouetted figure with large scissors inside an ornate frame, with spiders on a web below, with a soft red wash behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette with giant scissors in an ornate frame

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dark silhouette of a figure with tousled hair stands inside an ornate scrolled frame, holding large scissors. Below the frame, a spider web with several spiders is drawn in fine black lines. The main figure and frame are shaded in black and grey, with a soft red wash behind the silhouette.

Upper arm Silhouette Scissors Frame Spider Spider web Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Row had ever paid him, which is why the hedges kept growing back in the shapes he gave them. He came at dusk, when the spiders came out to work the privet and the lane smelt of cut grass and rain. My mother said he had the kind of hair that held a storm, and that he never once looked at a window he could not see into.

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He hung the frame in our parlour the week before the harvest supper. It was gilt, scrolled like a fern unrolling, and when he stood inside it his shape went black against the glow of a sunset painted behind the glass. Father laughed at it. Mother did not. She counted the spiders hanging in the corner of the frame the morning after, eleven of them, and by noon there were eleven more on the gate.

The scissors were the thing nobody liked to say aloud. Great black blades as long as a man's forearm, always open, always half closed on something. Mr Harrow's dog went quiet after it was snipped at the lane. The Pell girl stopped speaking altogether. Each cut he made in the hedge came back to the parlour window as a line of new web, fine as thread on a hem, stitching the village shut.

I took the frame down myself on the last night of September and carried it to the river in the rain. The spiders ran up my sleeves the whole way. When I looked back from the bridge, the lane was clean and the hedges stood plain and green and ordinary, and the empty frame lay face up on the water with the red sky still caught in the glass.