Traditional colour tattoo of a dagger gripped by a hand with a crown pommel, above a red rose and black leaves, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a crowned pommel and a hand gripping the hilt sits above a large red rose with black-outlined leaves on either side. The bold black outlines and solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, with red shading on the petals and grey shading on the blade and leaves. The tattoo is centred on the upper back, with the rose set just below the dagger's guard.

Traditional Back Dagger Hand Crown Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter's boy found the dagger at the top of Kessel Gap, its crowned pommel just showing above a drift that had not been there at midsummer. Nobody had walked that road since the first frost, and the boy was not one for omens, so he knelt in the snow and worked the blade free. The grip was cold, and the fingers closed around it as if whoever held it had only stepped out of the wind and meant to come back.

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His mother told him to carry it down to the priest in Lower Harl, who would know whose it was. The priest turned the dagger over in the candlelight, read the small letters cut into the steel, and went quiet for a long time. "Maren Holt," he said at last. "She went up to meet the man who promised to marry her, and she never came down. Everyone said he took the southern road and left her. Nobody thought to ask the knife."

That night the boy dreamed of a rose growing out of the snow at the gap, red as a coal, its leaves black with frost. He climbed back up at first light with a loaf and a lantern. Where the drift had been, a bush had forced its way up through the white, one bloom open and the thorns bare. Beneath its roots, pale as candle wax, lay a second hand, and on one of its fingers a ring threaded on a cord.

He carried the ring down, and the priest buried it with Maren in the churchyard, under a stone that bore no name. The dagger hangs above the carter's hearth now. Travellers still cross Kessel Gap in winter, and if they see a red bloom through the snow at dusk, the carters say, they keep to the road and do not stop to pick it.