Black outline tattoo of a red ball of yarn with a knitting needle and a thread trailing down to a heart, on the side of a finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yarn ball and heart on a finger

Hand · Mixed · Photo

A red ball of yarn is pierced by a black knitting needle, and a single black line runs from the yarn down the finger to a small outlined heart. The linework is bold and even, with the yarn filled in red stripes and the heart left open. The plain background and close framing keep the focus on the tattoo.

Hand Yarn Knitting needle Heart Thread

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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

Pull your collar up, love, the rain's not finished with us yet, and mind the puddle by Mrs Tupper's onions. You asked about the red wool on the end stall, and it's a longer road than a wet Saturday deserves, but I'll give you the short of it while the kettle's on.

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Hettie Marr sold wool from a stall much like this one, down at Scarrow Bay, and she knitted for the lifeboat crew between customers. Her needle was her mother's, steel gone dark at the tip. The crimson skein was the last of a dye lot nobody made any more. When the fog came in one November and her Eli didn't come back up the slipway, she sat with that ball in her lap and kept working one row after another, because her hands didn't know how to stop.

She set the ball down on the harbour wall one evening, the needle still stuck through it, and a single thread ran off from it toward the water. She didn't cut it. She followed it with her finger, round the bollards and back, until she'd tied it off in a small knot shaped like a heart, the way Eli used to tie the mooring lines for her when she was a girl. A boy fishing off the wall found the knot the next morning, and he kept it in his pocket for years, and that's the wool I'm selling you now. Take it. The rain's easing, and I've been talking too long.