Pencil flash drawing of a dagger entwined by a snake, with a rose and leaves, in a neo-traditional style, shown on paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and snake flash design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper shows a dagger with a snake coiled around its blade, a rose bud at the top and leaves filling the gaps. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatched shading on the snake's body and light blue wash behind the lower coils. The design is centred on a plain cream sheet, with a pencil and ruler visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Dagger Snake Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sketch was still folded in my coat pocket when the sports hall started filling up, creased twice so the blue wash had cracked along the fold. Nobody from Year Eleven had heard from Marcus Okafor since the summer he left Ashgrove, so when he came in past the trestle tables with his hands in his jacket, I assumed he'd come for the free sausage rolls like the rest of us.

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He'd spent double Maths drawing on the backs of exercise books. Daggers, always, with something wound round the blade. Mrs Pryce confiscated a whole stack of them once and read them out in assembly as an example of what not to do, and Marcus just sat there grinning at the floor. The snake was always his favourite part. He said it was the only creature in the drawing that had a plan. The rose bud at the top was for his nan, who grew them in a yard in Leeds and never let anyone pick them.

He recognised the sheet before I'd even unfolded it. He turned it over in his big careful hands and said the shading on the snake's belly was wrong, far too heavy, and then he went quiet for so long I thought he'd walked off. When he looked up he wasn't grinning. "I kept the rose," he said. "Everything else I had to draw again for a living, and the rose was the only bit I never had to fix."

He took the pencil from behind my ear, which I'd forgotten I'd put there, and added one small curl of petal at the edge of the page. Then he folded the sheet back along its old crease and pushed it gently across the table to me.