Flash design of a red heart pierced by a green dagger with dripping blood drops and the word BOSS written above in black lettering.

Dagger through a heart with BOSS lettering

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows a red heart pierced horizontally by a green dagger with an ornate hilt, with three red blood drops falling beneath it. The word BOSS is written above in loose black handwritten capitals. Black outlines and shading define the heart and blade, with white highlights on the heart and red and green fills.

Traditional Heart Dagger Blood Drop Lettering

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

Sit yourselves down, the gulls can wait. You want the tale of how Maud Pardoe came to be called Boss, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the fish still on the slab and the tide going out.

Keep reading

Maud ran the fish market at Porthallow after her husband's lungs gave out. The men on the quay thought a woman with a ledger was a joke, right up until she sold the Dennick brothers their own catch back at a penny under what they'd paid for it. She chalked BOSS on the board above the scales in letters so big the gulls wouldn't land under them, and that was the end of anyone arguing with her.

There was a smith up the hill, Silas Quarm, who had cast a green glazed hilt for a dagger nobody had ordered. He'd been sweet on her since she was seventeen and never once said so, which is the sort of thing that rusts a man from the inside. One November he came down to the quay with the blade wrapped in oilcloth and laid it on her counter. "Thought it wanted a home," he said. She turned it over, looked at him, and said the only thing a boss ever says. "Then you'd better come sharpen it for me every Thursday."

He did, for forty-one years. When a knife slipped on the tuna that first morning, three drops fell onto the boards, and Maud never scrubbed them up. The market still calls that corner the Heart. When they buried Silas, they gave his hilt back to her, and she's sharpening something on it still every Thursday, with the tide coming in under the quay.