Traditional style flash drawing of a black dagger piercing two red and orange roses with black leaves and a rose bud.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing an ornate black dagger running diagonally through the centre of two open red and orange roses, with dark green-black leaves and a small bud at the lower left. The linework is bold and black, with solid black areas on the dagger hilt and leaves and simple grey shading on the blade. The design sits centred on a plain pale background with a wooden surface visible at the bottom right corner.

Traditional Dagger Rose Rose bud Leaves Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the tiller under her elbow and the Trent running brown beneath the bow when the rope snagged. Her father's dagger lived in the wheelhouse locker, wrapped in oilskin, its black hilt worn glossy where his palm had sat for forty years. He had carried it since the Gainsborough years, though he never once used it on anything but frozen hawsers and the baler twine off hay bales.

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The roses were older than the dagger. Her mother had painted them on the cabin side the summer they bought the boat: two open blooms in orange and rust, leaves dark as tar, and a bud low down by the rubbing strake where children always leaned. Every spring somebody touched them up. Nell had done it last year with the same tins, and it had taken her a week to get the shading right on the lower petal.

The mooring rope at the bow was wound round the bollard twice and iced fast at the eye. She fetched the dagger, unwrapped it, and was surprised by how light it felt, lighter than the memory of it. The blade was grey with old oil. She sawed through the rope in three strokes, and the barge swung out into the current with a groan of timber, as if glad to be going.

She wrapped the dagger back in its oilskin and put it in the locker. Then she took a rag and the small tin of red from under the bench. Downstream the first light caught the cabin side, and steering with one knee she dabbed a fresh petal onto the bloom where the paint had flaked away, careful not to go over the line.