Traditional style colour tattoo of a dagger with a red gem hilt, a winged moth above and a red rose with green leaves on a forearm.

Dagger and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a red gem set in its hilt runs vertically down the forearm, with a winged moth shape above it and a red rose wrapped around the blade near the lower half. Bold black outlines define the forms, with smooth red, green, teal and orange shading. The design is centred on the arm against a plain yellow wall, with a dark sleeve visible at the top left.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Moth Gem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You pull the shutter down on Mill Street at ten past two, though the man who left the dagger said he'd be back before the last tram. Nobody comes back before the last tram. The dagger sits on the counter in a square of tissue, its hilt cast as a moth with wings spread wide, red and orange panels edged in gilt, and a red stone in the grip that catches the sodium light through the window like something still warm.

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The blade is slimmer than it looks, grey steel with a teal fleck where the rust never quite got going. Someone has wound a rose around it low down, the petals dark and layered, the leaves green as bottle glass. You turn it over with the loupe you keep for watches and find a maker's stamp worn almost smooth, and beneath it, scratched with a pin, a date from the year the factory on Canal Road shut its gates for good.

Your father kept a shop like this for thirty years and taught you that a weapon with a flower on it is never really for the thing it was made to hurt. It is a promise, or a debt. You ring the number written on the card taped to the tissue. It rings four times in a flat above the bus station, then a woman answers, breathing as if she has run up stairs. 'The moth,' she says. 'Did he leave the moth?'

You tell her he did. Outside, a tram sighs along the rails and stops, and the last one of the night goes on without anyone getting off. 'Keep it,' she says. 'Keep the rose too. He always said roses only open once you've stopped waiting for them.' You stand under the sodium light with the dagger in your palm, and the stone is still warm, as if somebody has only just put it down.