Traditional style tattoo of a dagger piercing a red rose with green leaves, placed on the inner forearm of a person wearing a navy striped top.

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a ribbed grey handle and gold crossguard is driven through a red rose with green leaves and small sprigs. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills of red, green and yellow are typical of traditional tattooing. The design sits centrally on the forearm against a plain white background, with the wrist and hand visible below.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Leaves Sprig Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been going since Tuesday and the gutters on Tanner Street had given up trying. I was sitting in the back of the Lantern Bar with a glass of something brown when Mags Doyle came in shaking water off a red umbrella that had seen better decades. She didn't sit. She put a brass key on the table, the kind with a ribbon of worn leather on it, and said Vesna Holt had kept the flat above the chemist's for eleven years and never once paid the gas.

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I knew the flat. Four rooms, a window that looked onto the railway cutting, and on the sill a rose in a jam jar that Vesna swore was the same plant she'd carried out of her mother's garden in Hackney. Nobody had seen her since Friday. The jar was still there, Mags said, but the water had gone green and the petals had turned the colour of old brick. Somebody had left a blade in the sink, a dagger with a grey ribbed handle and a gold crossguard, clean as a bone.

I asked Mags whether the police had been. She laughed, short and dry, and said the police only came when someone was dead. I asked her what she wanted from me. She tapped the key with one nail, painted the red of the rose, and said she wanted to know who had been bold enough to put a knife through a flower in a woman's own kitchen.

I found the answer at four in the morning under the arches, where the lamps buzz and nobody lies to you on purpose. Vesna was alive, sitting on a crate with her sleeve rolled up, and the knife was hers. She'd used it to cut the stems that morning, she said, because the rose had to come with her, and a rose with a blade through it was the only thing that ever got past her landlord.