I’ve been wanting a tattoo wrapped around my forearm for a while, and I made the plunge! I worked on ideas for over a year, found a tattoo artist locally that does phenomenal floral work, and took my rough sketches to her. I’m very pleased with the outcome! In the tattoo are flax flowers (flax is the fiber used to make linen), cotton flowers (which occur before the formation of the iconic cotton boles), hemp (used to make rope and nets historically), a silk moth (the modern kind that has been bred for silk production), and a footprint each of several fiber producing animals: sheep, rabbit, bison, alpaca, goat. Then in the middle, in homage to the original spinner and weaver, a spider in a web.

The tattoo artist is Paige Parman at Old Souls Ink in Weatherford, TX. I waited to take pictures until the tattoo was fully healed, and took them while I was spinning alpaca fiber on my Befra Willy spinning wheel (in the background of all the pictures).