Traditional style flash design of a woman with dark wavy hair, a pincushion, a tape measure frame and blue scissors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with tape measure frame and scissors

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A stylised woman with dark wavy hair, red lips and a pearl necklace sits at the centre, wearing a red pincushion with pins in her hair. A yellow tape measure with numbered markings forms an oval frame around her, and a pair of blue scissors crosses the lower edge. Bold black outlines and flat areas of colour give the design a classic flash sheet look, set against a pale teal background.

Traditional Woman Portrait Pin Scissors

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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

Put the bag on the table, love, and don't mind the guard, he's only counting my buttons. Forty-one years I've crossed this line with a pair of shears in my coat, and nobody has ever asked what they were for. Tell him they're for cutting cloth. That's mostly the truth.

Keep reading

You want to know about the woman in the frame? She came into my shop in Ostrava the winter the river froze. She wanted a wedding dress cut from her late husband's greatcoat, which I had never been asked for before and have not been asked for since. She stood where you're standing and measured herself with my own tape, the yellow one with the numbers worn off at the sixteen, and she gave me every figure without once looking at the mirror. A red pincushion sat in her hair, bristling with pins like a hedgehog caught in a hailstorm.

I cut the cloth with those blue scissors, the ones with the looped handles that sing when they close. Three weeks I stitched by lamplight, and every seam felt like a sentence I had to finish. On the morning of the wedding the border was shut and the bride was stuck on the wrong side of it. So I folded the dress over my arm, walked it across the bridge, and presented it at the checkpoint like a shroud for the living.

The guard lifted the sleeves. He lifted the hem. He found nothing but lace and one pearl sewn into the bodice, which I had put there so the bride would have something cold to hold when her nerves went. He waved me on. I never told anyone that the bride was already waiting on the far side, laughing at the tape measure I'd left wound around her wrist, and that she has never once paid me for the dress.