Traditional style tattoo of a dagger piercing a red rose with green leaves, placed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a dark hilt and blade runs vertically through a red rose surrounded by green leaves. Bold black outlines define the design, with solid red, yellow and green fills and blue-grey shading along the blade. The tattoo is centred on a forearm against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Sword Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Stoke Gallows has stopped waving at you since the spring, which you take as a sign the coal is sitting too low in the water for him to pretend otherwise. Your father's rose is still painted on the cabin doors of the Lenore, its red gone the colour of weak tea where the rain runs off the roof, and the dagger he carved for your mother hangs on a nail above the stove, its blade blunt from years of cutting bread.

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Gerrit Mole from the upper reach has offered you four hundred pounds for the boat and a sour look for the trouble. He wants the mooring at Chalk Wharf and the rights to the towpath water. You tell him the Lenore is not for sale, which is true, and that the boat has been in your family since before the canal companies had lawyers, which is also true. He laughs at both of you until the frost on his stern rope cracks and he has to go and see to it.

At night you sit on the gunwale with the lamp between your boots and count the locks to the sea: eleven down, then the tidal basin, then whatever comes after. The dagger comes off its nail. You turn it over in your hand. The handle is wrapped in the same twine your father used, and the point still catches the lamplight the way it did the day he told you the rose was for your mother and the blade was for anybody who came between them.

In the morning you untie the Lenore and let the current take her. As you pass the chamber you drop the dagger over the side, a small bright flick that is gone before the gates swing shut behind you. Mole will hear about it by noon, and he will not understand. The rose stays on the doors, and it goes on down the river without the blade.