Colour tattoo of a blue and grey yarn skull with crossed knitting needles and the words KNIT FAST and DIE WARM, on the upper arm.

Yarn skull with knitting needles and lettering

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A ball of blue, teal and grey yarn is wrapped into the shape of a skull, with knitting needles and a crochet hook crossed behind it. The words KNIT FAST sit above and DIE WARM below in black serif-style capitals, with a red and orange wash behind the design. Bold black outlines and colour blocking give the piece a neo-traditional feel, and it fills the frame centrally against the skin.

Neo-trad Upper arm Skull Yarn Knitting needle Lettering

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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 that chair nearer the stove, love, and mind the cat, she's been sulking since the trams stopped. It was the February the river froze solid under the iron bridge, the winter the whole of the lower town went dark by ten, and old Agnes Rennie sat in her top-floor flat with a bag of blue wool that had been her husband's before the sea took him and never gave him back.

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The dockers' boys were out on the night shift in that cold, and Agnes had got it into her head that nobody should go to the quay with bare hands. So she knitted. Her needles went like a clock in the dark, and when she dropped a stitch she hooked it back with the crochet hook she kept in her apron pocket, grumbling at the lamp the whole while. Round and round the wool went, grey and teal and that deep blue like the water under ice, until the ball sat in her lap the size of a grapefruit and as heavy as a stone.

Tomas from the flat below came knocking at three with his mam's cough rattling through the floorboards and no coal left in the scuttle. Agnes took one look at his blue lips and said, knit fast, love, the cold never waits for anybody. She wrapped the ball round and round his wrists and sent him down the stairs with it unspooling behind him like a lead line.

She finished at dawn with the stove gone to ash. In the morning, they say, the ball was found on the cobbles outside the quay, wound so tight it had gone hard as bone, with two needles stuck through it like a pair of crossed oars. Nobody on the street would knit a thing for love after that. Mind your fingers on the kettle now.