Traditional style colour tattoo of an ornate dagger wrapped with a dark coil, surrounded by orange flowers and dark green leaves, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and flowers on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a red and black patterned handle and a scrolled, engraved blade runs diagonally across the image, with a dark coil wrapped around its hilt. Two orange five-petalled flowers with dark leaves tipped in red sit beside and below the blade. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated fills of red, orange, green and grey give a classic traditional look against the soft skin tone.

Traditional Ribs Dagger Knife Flower Leaves Scrollwork Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, love, and leave that cake alone until I've reached the dagger. Your grandad had it off a grinder at the Michaelmas fair in 1954, a man with a handcart and one good eye, who wanted three shillings for it and a bed for the night. Grandad gave him the bed and the three shillings and took the knife for nothing, which tells you the sort of fool he was and the sort of knife it must have been.

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The handle was bound in red and black, wrapped by a woman in Thurlow who kept geese and bad temper in equal measure. The blade had its scrollwork cut deep, curling like bracken in April. The grinder swore it had never drawn blood, which Grandad thought a fine joke until the morning a dark coil turned up around the hilt, neat as a sleeping cat, and nobody in the house would admit to tying it.

Gran said it was the grinder's wife doing it. Gran said a lot of things. What I know is that the marigolds along the back wall came up orange that summer, five petals each, their leaves tipped red as if someone had dipped them. Grandad cut a bunch and laid them on the kitchen table beside the knife, and in the morning the blade lay across them without a single stem bent.

He took the knife to the bins that afternoon and came back with his hands empty and his face very quiet. The grinder never returned for it. But every August after, the marigolds came up early along that wall, and Gran would set a single cup of tea on the back step for a man who had only ever wanted a bed for the night.