Traditional style flash design of a dagger dripping blood, wrapped in lettered banners over a drawn arm with a spider web and rose.

Dagger and banners flash with blood

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A dagger with a dark handle pierces through a banner of lettering and drips blood across a drawn arm. The arm carries a spider web and a rose, and more banners of lettering wrap around the design. Bold black outlines and red blood splatter sit against light blue and grey shading, with small dots scattered around the composition.

Traditional Dagger Blood Banner Lettering Spider web Rose Arm Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the van still smells of the bleach Mags used on the stage blood. We played the Crown to nineteen people and a dog, and afterwards Rory Teale stood by the bar telling anyone who'd listen that we'd sold out. That's rich from a man who once wore a Wham! jumper to a squat gig on purpose. I didn't answer him. I watched Mags tip a pint of cheap cider over his trainers and tell him, very politely, that the wall he was leaning on had been painted by better people than him.

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We drove home with the windows down because the heater's been dead since March. Mags sat in the back with her sketchbook on her knee, drawing the same rose she draws every time she's annoyed, petals shading into a grey that looks like weather. She'd spent the whole set glaring at the sound desk, and I'd spent it counting how many people were actually listening. Three, I think. The dog counted for two. Somewhere past Woodhouse she tore a page out, folded it into a strip and wrote something on it in capitals, pressing so hard the biro tore the paper.

She posted it through Rory's letterbox at six in the morning, wrapped round a demo tape we'd recorded in a garage in Attercliffe. I thought it would be a row. Instead, a week later, Rory turned up at practice with the tape in his hand, looking sheepish, and said he'd listened to it twice in the car. Mags didn't look up from her strings. She just nodded at the wall behind the drum kit, where the strip of paper was already pinned, its ink bleeding a little where the rain had got to it.