Flash sheet with two tattoo designs: a coloured dagger wrapped in a green snake, vines and red roses on the left, and a black and grey dagger with a snake on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger and snake flash designs

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The left design shows a jewelled dagger entwined by a green snake and leafy vines, with two pink roses and a small third rose near the base. The right design is a solid black dagger pierced through a coiled snake's head, with bold silhouette shapes and little internal detail. Both are set on a plain white background with a clean, centred composition.

Traditional Blackwork Dagger Snake Rose Vine Sword

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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

Dear Ruth, the rain has come back to Thornbury and the roses along Mr Pell's back wall have gone to ruin, which is what comes of planting them against north-facing brick. I went out with the shears this morning anyway because he asked me to. He watched from the step with his pipe going out every other minute and told me I was cutting the wrong canes, then told me I was right, which is how I knew he had been thinking about something else entirely.

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It was the dagger. He had it out on the kitchen table when I came in, unwrapped from a sheet of the Lincolnshire Echo. You will remember his brother Arthur, who brought it home from Naples in 1919 and never once spoke of where he got it. The blade is as long as my forearm and the colour of a pond in shadow. There is a green snake wound up the steel, its head resting just under the crossguard, and ivy climbing the grip so thickly you have to look twice to find the hilt at all. A red stone sits in the pommel like a drop of wine that has been left to set.

He wants it taken to the scrap man in Market Rasen on Thursday. I asked him whether it was worth anything and he said only to someone who wanted it, which is not an answer. So I am taking it to the station instead, wrapped in your mother's tablecloth, and if the ticket clerk asks I shall say it is a rose cutter, which is not so far from the truth. Pell says the roses will come back in June regardless. I have decided not to tell him where I am going.

Your loving cousin, Joan