Traditional style colour tattoo of a pink ball of yarn with knitting needles and a banner reading Knit Fast Die Warm, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yarn, needles and Knit Fast Die Warm banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A ball of pink yarn sits at the centre, wrapped by a light banner with the words Knit Fast above Die Warm in black script. Two brown knitting needles cross behind the yarn, with a third brown needle or hook running diagonally across the bottom and a red strand of yarn trailing from it. The bold dark outlines, flat fills and limited palette of pink, red and brown give it a traditional look, with faint grey shading on the yarn.

Traditional Upper arm Yarn Knitting needle Banner Script lettering Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways off the harbour since seven, and by eleven my stall under the market clock was the only one still open, mostly because nobody else was daft enough to sit beside a tin of wet wool. The cash box sat under the trestle with a brick on its lid, and my mother's needles were stuck through a ball of pink I had been too stubborn to sell.

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A man came dripping out of the arcade a little before noon, oilskin shining, and asked for something red that wouldn't run. I told him red always runs, that's the trouble with it, but he took the crochet hook from the tin anyway and turned it over like a fish he didn't trust. He said his wife had knitted every jumper his crew had worn for thirty years, and that the phrase stitched on her needle case was the only sermon he had ever believed. Knit fast, die warm. He said it like a joke he'd heard too many times to laugh at any more.

He paid me in coins that had been sitting in a pocket since before decimal money, and I didn't tell him they were worth more than the hook. When he had gone, I wound the loose red strand back around its cardboard, and that was when the rain stopped, all at once, the way it does in this town when it has finished with you.

I left the pink ball where it was, needles up like antennae, and began knitting a hat for nobody in particular.