Colour tattoo on a person's upper back of yellow flowers, grey-blue leaves, a ball of yarn with knitting needles and a chickadee, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow flowers, yarn and chickadee on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A ball of grey yarn with two knitting needles sits at the centre, surrounded by yellow five-petalled flowers and grey-blue leaves. A small chickadee perches on the right side, and a loose strand of yarn trails off to the left. The bold black outlines are filled with shading in yellow, grey and blue, and the design is arranged diagonally across the upper back.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Yarn Knitting needle Bird Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

It rained on the Thursday market at Hallow Cross the way it rained every week, sideways off the moor, and Nan Corrie kept her yarn under a sheet of tarred canvas while the other stallholders hollered about their cabbages. She was knitting when the stranger came, the grey wool heaped in her lap, two bone needles clicking as steady as a clock.

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The stranger wanted the grey. He said he owed the north wind a debt, and the north wind liked its wool the colour of wet slate. Nan did not like him. She told him the wool was not for sale, and he laughed and set a coin on the trestle, a small brown thing with a hole worn through it. Nan turned it over. On the back someone had scratched a bird.

The bird came then, a chickadee no bigger than a thumb, black cap and white cheeks, perched on the edge of the trestle as if it had flown in from another century. It pecked at the loose end of the yarn and pulled, and the strand ran off across the cobbles, through the puddles and the boots, past the fish stall and the cheese, toward the buttercups growing in the gutter by the churchyard wall. Nan followed it, because a knitter always follows a thread.

By dusk the rain had stopped, and the strand led her out past the last cottage to a field of celandines opening in the dark, each flower lit like a small lamp. The stranger was gone. The grey ball sat in the grass with the needles still through it, and the bird sang once and went quiet. Nan picked up the work and kept knitting, and somewhere in the long grey hours she could no longer tell which of them was unravelling.