Traditional style tattoo of a dagger piercing a layered flower with black outlines, grey shading and yellow accents, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a ribbed grip and a bound handle runs diagonally through a large flower with pointed, shaded petals. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading and dotted texture inside the petals and blade. Yellow ochre fills the flower's outer petals and the dagger's guard, set against bare skin and a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Flower Petal Blade

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop eyeing the cake. Your mother has given me five minutes and I intend to use all of them.

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My grandfather worked the fish quays at Grimsby with a dagger in his belt, a short thing with a ribbed grip he bound in red twine so it would not slip on wet hands. One spring he lost it at cards to a Dutch deckhand called Piet, who had a wife in every port and a dahlia inked on his forearm, its petals shaded grey and edged in ochre. Piet was so tickled at winning that he handed the knife straight back the next morning, on one condition: my grandfather must find him a dahlia in the market, a real one, because a blade with no bloom is only a grudge.

Grandfather searched every stall in town. He came home with nothing but a bunch of wilting marigolds and a sore head, and he sat on the back step and wept, which he never did, not even when his own father died. Then my grandmother, Edie, walked out of the kitchen with a dahlia from the window box, its petals just beginning to turn, and told him a man who would cry over a flower deserved to be married to one.

That is how I came to be sitting here, and why the dagger lives in the kitchen drawer with a dahlia pressed flat inside its twine. Tom, hand me the knife. Mind the blade. Now we cut the cake.