Colour tattoo of a teal ball of yarn pierced by two knitting needles, with a red rose and green leaves, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yarn ball, knitting needles and rose

Traditional · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a teal-grey ball of yarn with two orange-brown knitting needles crossing through it. A red rose with green leaves and stems wraps around the left side of the composition. The bold dark outlines and flat, solid fills give it a traditional look, with the yarn shaded in bands of grey and teal.

Traditional Yarn Knitting needle Rose Leaves Stem

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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

Mind the step, that one's loose. Right, sit yourself down by the stove, and don't touch the kettle, it's the only thing in this tower that works as it should. I'll tell you about Maud Tregenza, who kept the light on Gull Rock for thirty-one winters and never once let the oil run low, though the men on the mainland said she knitted more than she lit.

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She knitted for everyone who came off the boats. Teal wool, always, because it was the cheapest thing in the back room at the Co-op in St Ives, and she'd say the sea was that colour on a grey day and it did the lads good to be reminded. Her needles were orange-brown from years of her palm, and she kept a red rose bush by the door that the gulls never could get at, though they tried. Every jumper that went out on the Tuesday boat had a stitch of rose-red at the cuff, so a drowned man could be named by his sleeve.

Then came the winter the Mary Ann went down off the Carrick. Maud sat up three nights with a single ball of yarn and no pattern, knitting sleeve after sleeve for men who would never come back to wear them. The needles clacked until the lamp guttered. On the fourth morning the fog lifted, and there on the rocks sat a boy called Tommy Pascoe, blue with cold, wearing one of her grey-teal jumpers. His father had put him ashore at the last minute because the lad would not stop crying to go home.

So the sea keeps its tally, but it's a careless bookkeeper. Now pass me that cup, and mind you don't drop it on the way.