Traditional-style tattoo on an upper thigh showing a dagger over a banner reading Fear Cuts Deeper Than Swords, flanked by blue roses and dark leaves.

Dagger, banner and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a grey blade and dark hilt sits at the centre of the design, with a scroll banner wrapped across it bearing the words Cuts Deeper Than Swords and a smaller word above. Two blue roses with black outlines and shaded petals sit at the base, with dark leaves and stems extending around the banner. The bold black outlines and flat fills are set against bare skin on a thigh, with a checked floor visible in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smith of Caddery Vale made one blade a year, and by the time you were old enough to work the bellows she had already sold the last of them to the wrong sort of lord. Now the sweeping of her forge falls to you. The floor is laid in chequered flagstones, black and grey, and the ash never quite lifts from the cracks. People in the valley swear the blades are cursed because they never snap and never dull. They do not snap. They simply find the soft place under a man's ribs, and nobody sees them go in.

Keep reading

The king's herald came in the wet spring, wanting a sword to end his neighbour's war. She listened, nodded, then took a dagger from the rack with a dark horn grip and a blade the colour of rain on slate. The herald laughed and asked why a dagger when a sword would do. She said a sword makes a man brave enough to march, but a dagger makes him afraid to sleep. He paid in silver and rode off. You did not understand the joke until autumn, when the neighbour's army went home without a single battle and the king stopped sleeping in his own bed.

After she died you found her ledger under the anvil. Every blade had a line: a buyer's name, a village, and one word, always the same. Fear. Beneath the last entry she had pressed two blue roses from the bush by the well, their petals gone the colour of old bruises. You understood then that she had never really sold steel. She had sold the thing that waits behind it.

You still make one blade a year. You stitch a strip of linen, letter the words across it in black thread, and wind it around the hilt so the buyer reads it before they see the edge. Fear cuts deeper than swords, you tell them, and they nod as though they have heard it before. They always pay the full price. Nobody has ever asked for a refund.

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