Traditional flash drawing of a dagger with a red rose at its base, with green leaves, small pink flowers and a red star on the hilt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A dagger points downward through a large red rose with green leaves and yellow highlights. Two small pink flowers with dark stems sit either side of the hilt, and the blade has black and grey shading with a red tip. The bold black outlines and flat red, green and yellow fills are set on a plain pale background with a dark vignette.

Traditional Dagger Rose Flower Leaves Star Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth carried the water up from the beck at first light, because the well had frozen solid for the third week running. Her father sat at the range with the dagger across his knees, the one with the red-painted grip and the star cut into its pommel, and he did not look up when she came in.

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"Put it back in the drawer, Father," she said. "The bread will not cut itself." He told her what he had told her every January since she was small. The blade had gone into the ground under the old orchard wall the winter their first cow died, and in spring a single red rose had come up through the very spot where the point went in. It bloomed in frost, he said, with leaves green as holly and edged in yellow like late sun. Ruth had never seen it. She had only ever seen the wall.

That morning the wall had split in the night. Among the fallen stones lay a cluster of small pink flowers pushing up through the snow, bright as coins. Ruth knelt and brushed the white away, and there was the blade standing upright in the frozen earth, its black shading glossy and its tip red as a robin's breast. She worked it loose with both hands, and the rose at its foot opened its petals in the cold, as though someone had struck a match.

She carried it indoors and laid it on the table beside the loaf. Her father looked at the blade, then at the two pink flowers she had tucked into her coat, and for the first time since the thaw failed he laughed out loud, a sound like a gate swinging open. "Your grandmother said the ground keeps what it is given," he said. "Now it has given something back." Outside the wall stood broken and the snow lay blue across the orchard, and the rose went on blooming in the dark.