Traditional colour tattoo of a dagger with a snake coiled around the hilt, flanked by yellow flowers and dark green leaves, on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger, snake and flowers on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A dagger runs diagonally across the skin, with a snake coiled around its hilt and a red and yellow patterned grip. Yellow five-petal flowers, dark green leaves and buds frame the blade, which is shaded in grey with bold black outlines. Red, yellow, green and blue ink dominate the composition, which is set on soft, lightly lit skin.

Traditional Ribs Dagger Knife Snake Flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dagger had never once missed its mark, which was the trouble. Silas Halloran, who ran the travelling fair, wanted it to miss just once so the crowd would gasp, and he said so every October, leaning on the caravan step with a pipe gone cold.

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Nell Ashby threw the knives on Thursdays. She had inherited the blade from her grandmother, and the snake that wound round its hilt had come with it, a thin grey thing that lived in the brass collar and ate nothing but the moths that gathered under the lamps. Nell fed it a moth each night. It was the only promise she had ever kept without fail.

When Halloran pressed her, she carried the dagger out to the far field where a ragged hedge ran along the ditch. She threw it once, not at a board but at a fence post, and the blade bit deep. The snake lifted its head from the grip and looked at the hedge for a long moment. Then it slid down the hilt and away into the grass, leaving the handle bare and warm in her palm.

The next morning the gorse along that ditch had come into flower, yellow blossoms opening in a line as neat as lamps. Halloran stood at the caravan step and said nothing, and for once the pipe stayed unlit. Nell wrapped the dagger in oilcloth and tipped a moth into the tin anyway, though there was no snake left to eat it.