Black stitch-style tattoo across a finger, styled to look like surgical sutures, photographed against a blurred outdoor background of greenery.

Stitch tattoo across a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a hand held up to the light, showing a row of short black marks across one finger that imitate surgical sutures. The lines are crisp, dark and mostly solid, with small angled ticks and a thread-like curve, and there is little or no shading. The ink is pure black on skin tone, and the finger sits in sharp focus against soft, out-of-focus foliage in warm sunlight.

Hand Stitches Finger Thread

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

Abel had never let a stitch go unchecked in forty years at the loft, and he was not about to start on the day the mainsail for the Brightwater came in torn from head to clew. He laid the canvas across the trestles and walked his thumb along the rip, counting under his breath. "Twenty-three," he said. "Every one of them will hold, if you pull them tight and leave the ticks even."

Keep reading

Nell had the needle already, a bone-handled palm with waxed thread coiled round her wrist. She had been at the loft since spring and still got the angle wrong, driving the needle in at a slant so the thread bit the cloth and puckered. Abel would not let her unpick a seam for it. "A stitch is a promise you've already made," he said. "You can't unmake it. You can only mend it beside itself."

The sail took her three days. On the second afternoon the needle skipped and went into the pad of her left forefinger, leaving a neat bead of blood on the white cloth. Abel looked at it, then at her, and handed over a clean rag and a pinch of tallow. He did not send her home. He said nothing about it at all, which she came to understand was his way of saying she had not ruined anything.

When the sail was bent on and the Brightwater slipped past the breakwater, Nell stood on the quay with the wind pushing at her coat. Abel came out beside her carrying two mugs of tea gone lukewarm. He watched the boat heel, then tilt his chin towards the seam he could still see from the quay, a faint dark line running up the mainsail where the light caught it. "Count them, if you like," he said. "Not one came undone."