Colour tattoo on the upper arm of green and teal yarn balls, a red yarn skein and pink flowers, with the words Keep Calm arched above and Carry Yarn below.

Yarn balls and flowers with Keep Calm Carry Yarn

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of three yarn balls in green, teal and red, with a cluster of pink and yellow flowers around them. The words KEEP CALM sit in an arc above and CARRY YARN in an arc below, in dark outlined lettering. The shading is smooth and the colours are saturated against the skin.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Yarn Flower Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third week the pit stayed shut, Ada Parry still sat by the range with her wool in her lap, knitting when the rest of Cwm Ddu had stopped. The men were under the hill, eleven of them, and the rescue men said the roof would not hold a lamp for long. Her sister-in-law wept into the tea. The chapel women prayed in rows. Ada counted stitches.

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Her mother had a saying for it, a bit of nonsense off a tin sign in the Co-op window: keep calm, carry yarn. Nobody in the village knew what a tin sign was meant to mean, but they took it to mean you keep your hands busy and your wits about you.

On the fourth morning she took her green ball, her teal one, and the red one she had been saving for a jumper for her boy, and walked to the pithead with the wool trailing behind her through the frost. The foreman told her to go home. She tied the end of the teal to the iron gate and said nothing. She went down the line of the fence, unrolling as she went, winding the thread through the wire and down the lane to the mouth of the old adit where the drift ran in.

Then the knocking came. Three knocks, then two. It was her son's knock, and then it was eleven men's, following the wool back out of the black one stitch at a time. The last man out was carrying the red ball with the thread still wound on it, because the wool had caught on his belt and he would not cut it.