Traditional style tattoo of a dagger piercing a shaded rose with leaves, with an orange and black hilt, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with an orange and black hilt pierces a shaded grey rose surrounded by dark leaves and a blue-tinged halo. The linework is bold and black, with the rose and blade shaded in greys and the hilt and halo in colour. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a leopard print fabric background.

Traditional Upper arm Dagger Rose Leaves

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

The last rose on Halden Ring was still in its pot when the hull alarm went, and I remember thinking how stupid it was to save a plant before my own boots. Mira had grown it from a cutting smuggled up in a seed locker, six years of nursing it under the amber lamps while the rest of us argued about water rations. It was the only red thing aboard that wasn't a warning light.

Keep reading

I took it with me to the lock. Behind me the corridor sealed one door at a time, the way it had been drilled into us, bulkhead, bulkhead, bulkhead, and the air thinned into a sour whistle. Mira's old pruning knife was clipped to my belt, the one with the black hilt and the orange-brass collar she'd polished with her thumb until it shone. I used it to cut the stem short so the pot would fit under my arm, and the blade slid through the green as neatly as through paper.

Outside the hull, the stars were not stars but the grey scatter of the debris field, and beyond it the pale blue halo of the relay beacon that would keep calling for days after nobody was left to answer. I pressed the pot against the viewport glass. The petals had gone the colour of old ash in the cold, leaves dark as cast iron, and I could see my own breath fogging over them.

Somewhere a comms officer was reading out the manifest for the last shuttle. I wasn't on it. I had a knife, a rose, and a ship's worth of air to spend deciding where to plant them.