Traditional style colour tattoo of a dagger wrapped with a banner and a red rose, on the forearm.

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a dagger with a jewelled hilt, a star on the grip and a ribbon banner wrapped around the blade, with a red rose at the base. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid fills in red, yellow, blue, green and purple. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame on a forearm, with skin visible at the edges.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Banner Star Ribbon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the paintbrush in one hand and the rose half-finished on the blade when Dora Vance shoulders through the back door of the Ridgeway Hotel and tells you the Fairgrounds man is waiting in the alley with the truck. It is the last Thursday in August in Halden Falls, the sky over the grain elevator the colour of tinned peaches, and the travelling show leaves for Ohio at dusk. You have a dagger, a banner and a rose to finish, and one of those things is already late.

Keep reading

The knife belongs to Eli Marsh, who threw it at the fair for nineteen summers without once nicking the girl standing against the board. He left it with you in June, wrapped in a cotton shirt, with a note on the back of a feed receipt: keep the star bright, it's the only thing they look at. You have kept it bright. The ribbon wraps the blade in three loose turns, red script on cream, and the rose sits near the point like something that grew there overnight, petals gold at the edges, leaves dark as creek water.

Dora says the Fairgrounds man is paying twice what the hotel does for a sign painter, and that Eli would have wanted it finished by your own hand. You dip the brush and lay the last yellow edge while she counts the minutes out loud from the doorway. When you finally step into the alley the engine is running and the driver is squinting at the blade in the low light.

He holds it up, turns it over and grunts approval. Then he asks whose name is on the ribbon, and you tell him it is nobody's yet. He laughs and tosses the knife into the cab on top of the crates. You watch the tail lights out past the elevator until the dust settles, then go back inside to wash the paint from your hands, because the star is still bright and somebody in Ohio will look at it first.