Colour tattoo of two stitched rag dolls, one with pink hair and angel wings and one in a Batman shirt, on a red torn background on the calf.

Stitched rag dolls on a torn background

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two stitched rag dolls sit on a red, ripped shape: a doll with pink hair, a patched eye and angel wings wears a pink heart dress, and a button-eyed doll wears a black Batman top and blue jeans. The linework is bold and cartoonish, with soft shading on the faces and clothing and stitch details along the seams. Pink, red, yellow and blue ink dominate, and the design fills the leg with the rips and stitches framing the figures.

Neo-trad Calf Angel wing Stitches Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You had a bent needle between your teeth and a sheet of red canvas across your knees when the girl from the next boat came running down the towpath to say the lock was jammed again. Your two dolls were still propped against the chimney where you'd left them, the pink-haired one with the patched eye and the one with black button eyes and a Batman jumper that Sal had swapped you for a bag of peppermints. You tucked them under your arms before you went, because Tuppence, the button-eyed one, had a habit of climbing things.

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Hatch Lock had been jammed since the flood. Three narrowboats were nosed up behind the gates, their skippers smoking on the cabin roofs, and a row of children stood along the beam daring each other to walk it. The paddle gear had torn a wide flap in the old tarpaulin that covered the winch house, and red canvas hung off it like a split sail. Mr Abernethy, who kept the keys and no particular opinion of dolls, took one look at the tear and said it would need a dozen stitches before the water got in. You said it would need more than that. You had been mending things on the cut since you were small enough to be lifted over the coping, and you knew a seam that would hold from one that only looked like it would.

You knelt on the wet gravel and pinned the canvas, working from the middle outwards so the tension stayed even. Lark sat on your knee with her pillowcase wings lifting in the wind, and Tuppence leant against your shin to watch the needle go in and out. When the last stitch was tied the children cheered as if you had raised the gate yourself. Mr Abernethy pulled the lever, the water rushed up, and the boats began to rise. On the way back up the towpath Sal asked whether Tuppence had been brave. You said he had been stitched up exactly as much as anyone, which seemed to satisfy her.