Traditional tattoo of a red rose pierced by a dagger with green leaves, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a red and black ornate hilt passes through a red rose with green leaves, with the blade extending down the forearm. The tattoo uses bold black outlines, solid red and green fills, and grey shading on the blade to give it form. The subject is centred against a dark background, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp is still burning on the windowsill when Ada Pryce comes in from the lane, and you already know from the way she sets down her tin that the cage has been stopped again. The rose in the jar has dropped three petals onto the oilcloth since supper. You pick them up one at a time and fold them into your apron pocket, because your mother used to say a bloom that has been cut is owed some kindness.

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The dagger hangs above the range where your father left it, its hilt wrapped in red thread he bound on the week you were born. He never used it underground. He carried it for the pit owners' men, the ones who came down with ledgers and walked the galleries in clean boots. Ada asks why it is still hanging there, and you tell her it is waiting for someone with the nerve to take it down.

On Thursday the men go down anyway. You stand at the top of the lane with your hand over your eyes and count the lamps as they vanish, forty-one, forty-two, and then you run for the rescue hut where the blankets are kept. Ada is already there, sleeves rolled, cutting the twine from a crate with the dagger you fetched from the kitchen wall. The blade is thin and bright, and it goes through the rope as if it had been waiting all its life to do something useful.

When the first man comes up the shaft, coughing and grinning, Ada presses the red-threaded hilt into your hand and tells you to keep it. You never do hang it back above the range. Some nights you lay the rose beside it on the table, a bloom that should have died in the frost, and you let the two sit together until the lamp goes out.