Traditional style tattoo of a black dagger piercing a red rose with dark green leaves, placed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on the chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a black handle and ornate silver-grey guard pierces the centre of a red rose surrounded by dark green leaves and radiating black lines. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills with white highlights are typical of the traditional style. The rose and leaves carry the colour, set against the grey and black of the blade and handle on pale skin.

Traditional Chest Dagger Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the fair came over the moor road with its painted wagons, and every autumn the knife-thrower stood with his back to the wooden board while the children held their breath. His name was Ansel Dorr. He had never once missed the girl on the board, though she was a different girl each year, always someone's niece, always paid a shilling and a paper twist of barley sugar.

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The year the fair reached Hallam Green, the girl was called Nell Harrow, and she would not keep still. She said a man who threw so true was only pinning a shape he already knew, and that she was tired of being the shape. Ansel laughed and told her to hold her arms out. She did. He threw, and the blade hissed past her ear and buried itself in the board, and she did not blink. That was the first time he looked at her properly.

All that winter Nell came back to the wagons. She learned the weight of a dagger in her palm and the way the handle must sit against the fingers. She learned that a thrower's hand shakes only when he has stopped looking at the mark. By spring she could hit a painted rose the size of a plate from twelve paces, and Ansel stopped laughing when she did it.

When the fair left Hallam Green, the wagon with the painted rose on its door stood empty in the field. In the morning the blade was standing in the centre of the rose, handle up, and Nell was nowhere to be seen. Only a single red petal lay on the grass beside the wheel, and nobody could say how it had got there.