The wear lands on the handles, never the blade

An open pair of pinking shears, drawn large, lying diagonally across a scrap of cloth. Both blades' zigzag edges run unbroken from the pivot to the tip. The cloth underneath is cut with the same zigzag the blades would leave behind. At the pivot, a bolt; at the loops, one patch worn pale where the coating has rubbed through to bare metal.

The blade did the work. The handle shows it.

What is happening where the two blades meet the cloth?

The shears are drawn mid-cut, and the cloth beneath them already carries the edge they leave.

A straight pair of scissors cuts a straight line; pinking shears cut a line of small triangles, because each blade's edge is filed into teeth rather than ground flat. The scrap of cloth in the print isn't cut straight and then trimmed into a zigzag border afterwards — the zigzag border is the cut. Whatever these shears touch comes away already carrying their shape.

Why does a zigzag edge stop a woven cut from fraying?

Because it shortens how far any one loose thread can travel before it runs out of edge to follow.

Woven cloth frays because the threads running one way are only held in place by the threads running the other way, and a straight cut leaves a long, continuous run of exposed thread ends free to work loose together. A zigzag cut breaks that run into short diagonal segments — a thread pulling loose at any point hits the corner of a triangle within a few millimetres and stops, rather than travelling the whole width of the seam. It's a shape doing a hem's job without any stitching.

Why do the handles show wear and the blades don't?

Because the two parts are built to survive different things.

The blades are hardened for exactly one job — closing on cloth — and cloth is soft; a well-kept edge can go years without rounding. The loops are handled every time the shears are used, gripped under load by fingers carrying hand oils and grit, and the coating there is thinner and softer than the steel underneath. Wear finds the part built to be touched, not the part built to cut.

Is there a rights question with drawing a common tool like this?

Barely one at all, for a plain pair of shears.

An ordinary tool shape belongs to nobody in particular — style has no owner, a specific maker's design does — and pinking shears have looked roughly like this for a long time. The only case that needs permission is a tool stamped with a specific maker's mark drawn legibly enough to read as that maker's own branding, the same rule that would apply to a zip pull swapped for the wrong colour carrying a visible logo.

Does this work for a different tool, not just shears?

The shape works for any tool whose job leaves a visible signature — a pinking shears' cut, a die's stamp, a hole punch's ring. What carries over is drawing the tool beside the mark it makes rather than the tool alone, the same logic behind pairing a raw curled edge with the neckband that used to hold it flat: the object and the evidence of what it did, in one frame.

Wouldn't a plain pair of scissors read just as well at this size?

Not at a glance — the whole point of a pinking shears' silhouette is the teeth.

A closed pair of straight scissors is two long triangles and a hinge; enlarged to fill a chest, it reads as a generic tool before it reads as scissors specifically. A pinking shears' zigzag edge is legible as exactly what it is from across a room, which is most of the reason to draw this tool over a plainer one.

Does it print well?

Yes, provided the teeth stay geometric rather than getting softened into a fuzzy edge.

Two inks carry it: a cool steel grey for the blades, one warm orange for the handles and the cloth. Keep the zigzag drawn as clean triangles rather than a wavy line — that's the difference between reading as pinking shears and reading as a torn edge — and let the wear sit only where the print says it does, on the loops and the pivot, not smeared across the blade.

How do I get one made?

Describe the shears at JustOG — the garment colour, how open the blades sit, and where the wear shows on the handles. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The teeth are still sharp. The loops gave up first.