Colour traditional-style tattoo of a grey Singer sewing machine on a yellow and brown table, on the outer leg of a pale-skinned person.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Singer sewing machine tattoo on a leg

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a Singer sewing machine with a grey metal body, a yellow ball-shaped handwheel detail, and the word SINGER in black script on the arm. It sits on a yellow cloth-covered table with scissor motifs and a brown wooden base, with a light blue wash behind the machine. Bold black outlines define the forms, with flat colour and simple shading across the metal and wood.

Traditional Other Scissors

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 linen room on Ward 7 shut at ten, but Maureen Adeyemi still had the key on its red lanyard, and the old Singer bolted to the far table was hers for the hours nobody else wanted. The night sister had asked for twelve draw sheets hemmed by morning, and the yellow cloth spread under the needle was the last clean length left in the cupboard. Maureen pressed the treadle and the machine woke with its familiar clatter, the light from the lamp catching on the grey paint worn down to bare metal where generations of hands had gripped it.

Keep reading

Tomasz from the porters put his head round the door with two teas in polystyrene cups and said the thing sounded like a goods train coming up a hill. She told him the handwheel was the only honest part of the job. Turn it, and the needle answers. Turn it slowly and you get a neat row of stitches that will hold a bed sheet through a hundred boil washes. Tomasz said that was a lot of faith to put in a wheel. Maureen said her mother had put it in a Singer in a terraced house in Leeds, and it had never once let her down, which was more than could be said for the men.

By four the stack of sheets stood square on the trolley, every corner turned and pinned. The buzzers along the corridor had gone quiet, and the only sound was the hum of the fridge in the sluice. She stitched a tiny star into the hem of each sheet, a habit nobody had asked for and nobody had noticed, then set the scissors open on the yellow cloth, blades pointing at the window where the car park was turning from black to grey.