Traditional colour tattoo of a dagger with a red gem hilt, moth-like wings and a red rose with teal leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger with an ornate hilt, a red gem and moth-like wings sits vertically across the forearm, with its blade running down into a large red rose. Teal leaves and small red accents surround the rose, and bold black outlines define the shapes. The colour palette is limited to red, orange, teal, grey and black on a plain, softly lit background of skin and a yellow wall.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Moth Leaves Gem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The twine had frozen into the knot, and Nell's fingers had stopped answering her an hour ago, so she reached into her coat for the dagger instead. Her grandfather had carried it for forty years to cut baler twine and once, memorably, a ewe's fleece free from a fence wire. The hilt was brass gone brown at the edges, with a red glass stone set in the crossguard and wings of worn enamel that might once have been a moth's or a butterfly's. "It cuts what the weather holds," he used to say, and she had never known whether he meant the knots or the people.

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The sheep were bedded down in the lee of the barn, breathing clouds into the lantern light. Beyond them the old rose by the pen had been cut back to black canes in November. Dad had said it was finished, and nobody had argued. Nell had argued only with herself. She crouched in the frost and set the point of the blade under the grey bark of the nearest cane, a trick her grandfather had taught her for splitting kindling. The wood gave with a green, wet sigh.

Inside was a bud, closed tight and the colour of a cherry stone, holding its breath under the cold. A moth, wrong for the season, lifted off the lantern hook behind her and settled on the blade's guard as if it had come to check her work.

Nell did not cut the bud free. She slid the dagger back into her coat, tucked the cane under a sack, and went in to tell her father the rose was not finished after all.