Colour traditional dagger tattoo on a forearm, with a banner reading DEAD MEN DON'T CATCALL and small pin and anchor motifs below.

Dagger and banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a patterned hilt and blade runs vertically up the forearm, with a banner wrapped across it reading DEAD MEN DON'T CATCALL in black lettering. The bold black outlines are filled with red, orange, yellow, blue and pale teal, and a faint pale mandala appears behind the blade. A small pin cushion and an anchor sit lower down the arm against a wooden deck background.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Dagger Banner Lettering Pin Anchor Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Pirrie had mended sails in the loft above Gannet's Chandlery for nineteen years, and she could tell a man's footsteps on the harbour planks before he opened his mouth. These ones belonged to Dennis Coyle, the harbourmaster's nephew, who had been whistling since the tide turned at six.

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"Morning, Mags. Bit of a grand day for a smile, isn't it?" She didn't look up. The pin cushion strapped to her wrist was bristling with brass pins, and she moved one from the cloth to the seam without breaking stride. "Sail's not ready," she said. "Come back Thursday."

"I only wanted to see how it's going."

"Thursday," she said, and the word landed on the floorboards like a dropped spanner.

He leaned on the rail where her grandfather's sail knife hung from a nail, its hilt wrapped in red thread and its blade worn down to a sliver of moonlight. Gran had given it to her the year she learned to cut a clean line, and had told her the blade was for rope, not for men, which was the only advice Gran ever gave that Mags took entirely to heart. Dennis lifted the knife to admire it. She let him. Then she bit off the thread, set the needle down, and asked him very politely whether he knew what a gull could do to a net. He put the knife back on its nail and took the stairs down slower than he had come up, and the wind off the bay came through the loft door smelling of tar and not one bit sorry.