Colour tattoo on an upper arm of a multicoloured yarn skein pierced by yellow knitting needles, with a black outline of thread and a ribbon reading one stitch at a time.

Yarn skein and knitting needles with "one stitch at a time"

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A multicoloured skein of yarn in pink, green, blue and yellow is pierced by two yellow knitting needles, with a fine black outline of loose thread looping across the upper left. A cream ribbon banner across the right side reads "one stitch at a time" in black script. The shading is smooth and layered, and the colour ink dominates the composition on pale skin.

Upper arm Yarn Knitting needle Thread Ribbon Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win,

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You will laugh when you hear what I have done with the Thursday afternoons. Mrs Pyke from the Palais cloakroom has started a knitting circle in the back room behind the ladies' powder room, and she has roped me in because I am the only one who can count past forty without losing my place. There are eleven of us now. Two are widows, one is a bus conductress with hands like a navvy, and the youngest is a girl called Dolores who sings the Ink Spots while she purls and then goes red when we ask her to stop.

Last week Mrs Pyke brought in a skein of wool dyed in the colours of a sherbet bag, pink and green and that blue you only see on the sea at Filey, and she dropped it on the table like a bomb. 'Right,' she said. 'Who wants to make something they can wear to the Saturday dance?' Nobody answered, so I took the needles. Eleven rows of rib and I had dropped a stitch twice, and Dolores said my edging looked like a hedge that had been through a storm.

I went home and cried into the soup, which Tom says is the best thing I have ever done for seasoning. Then I sat up with the lamp and picked the whole row back, one loop at a time, and by morning the thing was straight.

The jumper is almost done now. It will not win any prizes. But when the band strikes up on Saturday I shall be in it, and nobody will know it took me a month to get the sleeves to match. Come up in June. I will teach you the knit stitch and you can tell me I am doing it wrong.

Love, Edie