Colour fine line tattoo on a forearm showing dashed stitch-style script reading Lovely, with pink and blue thread spools, a needle and red and purple buttons.

Stitched Lovely script with spools and buttons

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo runs along the forearm and combines the word Lovely written in dashed stitch-style script with sewing motifs. A pink thread spool and purple and teal buttons sit to the left, a red button sits within the lettering, and a blue spool with a needle and a trailing thread sits to the right. The linework is thin and the spools and buttons are shaded with colour, against a plain wooden background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Spool Thread Needle Button Script

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

Nan kept her sewing box on the windowsill of the back kitchen, where the light from the garden came in green through the bean canes. I was nine the summer she let me sit beside her and sort the buttons by colour, and she told me every one had belonged to somebody's coat before it came to us from the jumble tin.

Keep reading

The purple ones were from a cardigan her sister wore to chapel. The teal were off a christening gown nobody ever wrote down the name of. The red one she kept in her palm when she was thinking, turning it over with her thumb, and she would not say where that came from. When my sock came apart at the heel she threaded a needle without looking, pulled the blue cotton from the spool, and stitched it back in little dashes, humming the whole time.

She died the autumn I turned twelve. Mum gave me the box, and at the bottom, under the spools, was a note in her looping hand that said Lovely, with a dotted line running under it like a seam. I stitched it on my own arm the week I was old enough to sign for it, and every time I reach for a needle I see the red button she carried everywhere, still warm from her hand.