Pen drawing of a dagger with a rose at its centre, framed by leaves and sprigs with berries, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper with no body placement.

Dagger and rose design with botanical sprigs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a dagger with an ornate hilt, its blade crossed by hatched shading, sits above a open rose with layered petals. Leaves, branching sprigs and small berries fill the sides and extend above and below the central motif. The linework is dark brown on a cream background, with light hatching on the blade and rose, and the design is symmetrical and centred on the page.

Botanical Neo-trad Dagger Rose Leaves Sprig Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gemma is already at the buffet when you come in, pinning a name badge to her cardigan with the same care she once gave the Bunsen burners. Beside her name someone has stuck a tiny sprig of rosemary, which nobody else has bothered with. You used to carry rosemary too, a bit of it tucked into your blazer pocket on chemistry test days, because her gran swore it sharpened the memory. You had not thought about that in years, and now the smell of it is caught in your coat.

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You cross the sports hall carrying the thing you have kept in a biscuit tin since the Year Eleven leavers' dance: a rose pressed flat between two sheets of waxed paper, its petals gone the colour of weak tea. Gemma gave it to you that night, and you were too proud to take it, and then too proud to give it back. Twenty years of pride is a long time to carry something that small.

She sees the tin before she sees you, and she laughs, a short surprised sound that turns heads by the crisps. Then she opens her handbag and takes out a brass paper knife with a hilt shaped like a pine cone, its blade scored with fine crosshatching. She says she has carried it since the summer you stopped speaking, in case she ever needed to open something she should have opened long ago.

You swap them there, between the sausage rolls and the squash jug. You lift the lid, she slides the knife under the waxed paper, and the rose comes apart in your hands as dry and light as a moth. Neither of you says sorry. She lays the knife on the tablecloth, blade pointing at the door, and you both look at it for a long moment without picking it up.