Traditional tattoo of a washing machine and laundry basket framed by a red banner reading Home is where the laundry is, on a forearm.

Washing machine banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The design shows a front-loading washing machine with a round door and control panel, beside a red laundry basket holding folded clothes. A red ribbon banner above and below carries the words HOME IS WHERE THE LAUNDRY IS, and the scene sits within a blue cloud-shaped backdrop with orange and black leaves. Bold black outlines, smooth shading and flat areas of red, yellow, orange and blue give it a classic traditional look.

Traditional Forearm Banner Cloud Leaves Lettering

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

Dear Nan, the Atlantic has had my second-best jumper and I have decided not to forgive it. We are three weeks out of Avonmouth and the only machine aboard that turns anything is the cook's mixer, so on Sunday I stood in the galley with a bucket of salt water, a bar of carbolic and the dull feeling of a man who has joined the wrong trade.

Keep reading

Cookie, who is from Hull and never says more than four words at once, watched me scrub for a full minute before he took the bucket off me. He said the trick was patience and a wooden spoon, and then he showed me how the big copper pot we boil the potatoes in could be made to swirl a shirt round like a drunk waltzer. We hung everything from the rail above the stove, and by afternoon the galley smelled of wet wool and burnt onion, which is the nearest thing to home I have had since Portsmouth.

Something about that pot stayed with me. The ship rolled, the spoon knocked against the copper like a clock, and I thought of your old round-windowed twin-tub in the back kitchen, the one you kept a biscuit tin on top of. You used to press your face to that little glass and tell me the clothes were dancing. I laughed at you for it then.

I am writing this with a cup of tea Cookie made me, and the shirt is drying on the rail above the ovens, stiff as a flag. Tell Dad the basket on the fo'c'sle is still mine, and tell him I have finally understood what that old tin sign meant. Home is wherever somebody else is keeping the washing going, and I think I have found a good one. Your loving grandson, Tom.