Black and grey outline tattoo of scissors, a tattoo machine and ink pots across the upper arm and shoulder.

Tattoo supplies on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows scissors, a tattoo machine, ink caps and a grip arranged across the upper arm and onto the shoulder. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the machine body and ink pots. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, and the composition fills the arm with the tools overlapping each other.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Scissors Tattoo machine

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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

Ruth, I am writing this on the back of a petrol receipt because the notebook got wet at the Saltpan Junction diner, and I have decided to take that as a sign. You will want the particulars, so here they are. The long scissors with the worn bow are the ones my father bought off a sailor in Galveston. The machine with the brass coil hums like a fly against a window. I have left all of it in a crate under the bench in the back of the van, and the van is somewhere between here and the state line.

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The trouble started outside Dunmore Wells, where the front tyre gave up and I sat on the verge for three hours with the heat coming off the tarmac like breath. A lorry driver pulled over, wiped his hands on a rag and looked at the ink caps rattling in the footwell. 'Those yours?' he asked. I said they had been, once. He nodded at the grip wrapped in red tape and told me his brother had a hand like that, steady through forty years of welding. Then he drove on, and I was left with a flat tyre and a crate of ink I could not bring myself to open.

Somewhere in the second hour I started to draw. Not a design, just the things I could see: the scissors crossed like a pair of swallows, the pots lined up in the dust, the machine sitting heavy in the middle of it all as if it were the sun. I drew them on the back of that receipt until the pen ran dry, then laid it on the dashboard and let the wind carry it out toward the salt flats.

So that is the whole of it. The tools are yours if you want them, though I suspect you will say no and then sit up at the kitchen table with the scissors, practising a line you think nobody else will notice. Leave the porch light on. I will be home by the time the road stops shimmering.