Pencilled tattoo flash design of a dagger wrapped in grey scrollwork, with three pink roses and a red drip on the blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger, roses and scrollwork design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn design of a dagger running vertically, with a banner-like scroll around the grip and a pommel at the top. Three pink roses sit near the blade's tip, surrounded by grey acanthus-style scrolls and leaves. The linework is dark and bold, with grey pencil shading on the metal and scrolls, and pink and red tones on the roses and a small drip below the blade.

Neo-trad Traditional Dagger Rose Scrollwork Banner Blade Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 smith at Hollin Pit had made two knives for bread and cheese before Tom Ackroyd brought him iron from the seam under the chapel. It was black and sweating, and Tom asked for a blade that would cut a promise into a man's hand. The smith asked what promise. Tom said he would know it when he saw it.

Keep reading

The smith worked the metal three nights. On the fourth, the wild roses growing against the slag heap, which had no business flowering in that soot, came out pink all at once, and he took it as a sign. He quenched the blade in the bucket by the forge. The water hissed and turned red along the edge, though nothing had been cut. He bound the grip in brass scrolled like the ferns on the chapel door and told Tom that a blade wanted using once and then keeping.

Tom carried it down the shaft the next morning to Eli Crowther, who had lost two brothers in the fall of eleven and had not spoken to the owners since. Tom said nothing. He laid the knife on the bench between their lamps and waited. Crowther studied it a long while, then looked at his own cracked hands. He picked the blade up by the point and drove it into the timber prop beside him, and the groaning roof above them went quiet.

Crowther left it there thirty years. When the prop was finally drawn out, the wood had split along the line of the blade, and in the grain beneath it lay three roses, faint as pressed flowers, each one a shade redder at the tip than the rest.