Traditional style tattoo of a dagger piercing a red rose with dark teal and orange leaves and five stars above, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a star-set pommel and a red diamond on its grip pierces a red rose at the centre of the design. Dark teal and black leaves with orange highlights fan out behind the rose, and five black stars sit in an arc above the dagger. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills are typical of the traditional style, and the design is shown on the outer thigh with part of another tattoo at the left edge.

Traditional Thigh Dagger Rose Leaves Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan,

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Ward 7 goes quiet around three, once the pumps have stopped complaining and everybody who can sleep is sleeping. I sat at the desk with my tea gone cold and looked at the star chart Sister Okafor keeps pinned by the sluice. Five gold stars now, all in the top corner beside Mr Pryce's name. Each one is a patient who has walked the length of the corridor on his own feet. He cried when she gave him the last one, and I did not tell him I had cried in the sluice first, where nobody could see.

Mrs Dunning in bed four woke and asked for something to hold, so I fetched the tin you sent in, the one with the dagger on the lid and the red rose pinned through the middle. She held it on her knees like a hymn book. Her son Eddie brought her roses from Kirkgate market every Friday for forty years, she told me, and she never once asked him why he chose the thorny ones. I said I supposed he had known what he was doing. She said he never knew anything, bless him, but he kept coming back, which was the same thing.

At half five the window turned the dark green of the leaves on that tin, and the night porter wheeled the linen trolley past without a word. I wrote Mrs Dunning's obs on the board in my neatest hand, then sat with her until her breathing evened out. She is asleep now with the tin on her chest, and I have left the lamp on so the gold stars catch it.

Love, Jess