Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a purple yarn skull with crossed knitting needles and orange banners reading KNIT FAST and DIE WARM.

Yarn skull with knitting needles on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A purple yarn ball forms a skull with knitting needles crossing behind it, and two orange banners above and below read KNIT FAST and DIE WARM. Bold black outlines and flat fills in purple, orange and red give it a traditional look, with some shading on the yarn strands. Two views of the same forearm tattoo sit side by side, one slightly closer and the other a little further back.

Traditional Forearm Skull Yarn Knitting needle Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wool came up on the morning tide in a fishing creel, wet and smelling of tar, and Ada Pennock knew before she untangled it that somebody in the bay had gone out without a proper cardigan. She sat on the quay steps with the skein across her knees and worked the knots loose one by one, the way her mother had taught her, humming the tune that was never a tune. Gulls quarrelled over the chip paper. Across the harbour the lighthouse keeper's boy was shouting at a dog that would not come.

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By noon she had a ball the size of a turnip and a pair of needles she had pulled from the bottom of the lost property box at the chandler's. The sign above the chandler's door had said KNIT FAST for as long as anyone could remember, painted by a man who had only ever built boats. Ada took it as instruction. She cast on in the shelter of the bait shed, and the yarn ran so purple it looked dyed from the inside, and by the time the church bell struck two she had made something round enough to pass for a head.

When the fog rolled in at four, half the harbour came down to find her sitting in the doorway with her hands full of wool. Old Tom Fairweather, who had been arguing with the sea since before the war, took one look at the lumpy face with its two dark eyes and its crooked grin of cast-off stitches, and laughed until he had to sit down. "Die warm," he said, wiping his eyes. "That's the sensible way to go." Ada tied off the last thread, bit it clean, and handed him the scarf she had made from the spare.