Black ink dotwork drawing of a dagger piercing a stippled rose, with red geometric circle lines behind it, on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and rose tattoo design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a dagger driven through a rose, with the blade running diagonally across the flower. The petals and leaves are built from fine black dots and short hatched lines, and the blade is outlined with clean contour strokes. Faint red construction lines form a circle and star shape behind the motif, and a hand holding the paper and a pen appear at the edges.

Dotwork Geometric Dagger Rose Leaves Geometric line Circle Star Sketch

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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 compass was still open on the drawing table when Marguerite found the letter folded inside Father Ansel's breviary, the paper gone soft as cloth. She had come to Ashcombe to clear the parsonage, not to read. But the ink had bled through in neat, stippled dots, the way he always shaded when he was troubled, and she could not stop herself from turning it to the lamp.

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He had drawn the rose first, every petal built from tiny black points until it looked more like frost than flower. Then the dagger, laid across it on the diagonal, its blade outlined in one clean unbroken stroke. Over both he had scratched a faint red circle, and inside it a star whose points he had counted and recounted, judging by the rubbed-out ghosts at each tip.

Beneath the drawing, in his cramped hand: The rose does not bleed. The blade does the remembering. Sell the house to the Pryce boy, but keep the star.

Marguerite laughed once, too loudly, in the empty room. The Pryce boy had drowned off the Skerries in March. She turned the page over. On the back, drawn lightly in pencil, was a second rose, its stem already wrapped around a blade that had not yet been finished, and beside it a fresh red line, waiting for a hand to draw the circle that would close it.