Traditional style flash drawing of a dagger piercing a dark red rose surrounded by black leaves, with orange and yellow accents on the hilt and blade tip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A bold drawing of a dagger with a patterned black and orange hilt driven through a dark red rose with a white highlight. Black leaves frame the rose on both sides, and the blade tip is shaded orange. The linework is thick and outlined, with solid black fills and fine dotted shading on the blade and leaves, set against a speckled grey background.

Traditional Dagger Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came early that year to the fen monastery of Saint Wendreda, and with it a rose opened on the south wall where no rose had any right to be. Brother Osric, who kept the cellar and the bread-knife and everything else in the house that needed cutting, saw it first at Lauds. It was dark red, nearly black at the heart, and the petals were untouched by the cold.

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The Abbot had no patience for wonders. He told Osric to take the bloom to the altar before the bell for Prime, and to use the short dagger he wore on his belt for cord and rind. Osric knelt in the wet grass and closed his hand round the stem. The thorns did not prick him. The blade would not cut the green stalk, though he sawed until his wrists ached, so at last he drove the point through the heart of the flower. The petals did not tear. They folded round the steel like lips, and the leaves, dark as ink, curled up over the knuckles of his hand.

When the Abbot came out with the bell rope in his fist, he found Osric sitting in the frost with the hilt standing upright among the leaves, the orange-tipped point sunk deep into the mortar of the wall. The Abbot pulled, and the dagger did not move. He pulled again and then stopped, and after a while he knelt beside the lad and said, quietly, that he had been wrong to call the thing a sin.

The rose let go of the steel that morning, and the dagger stayed fast in the stone. Every frost since, the bloom returns to the same spot, and the brothers walk round it on their way to the refectory without being told to.