Traditional style flash drawing of a red heart pierced by a green dagger, with a drop of blood and the word BOSS in black script above.

Dagger through a heart with BOSS lettering

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A red heart with white highlights is pierced from the right by a green dagger with a ornate hilt, and a single drop of blood falls from the lower edge. The word BOSS is written in loose black script across the top of the sheet. Bold black outlines and flat areas of colour give the drawing a classic flash look on a plain white background.

Traditional Heart Dagger Blood Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pilling ground the blade in her father's back shed on Carver Street, the winter the lease ran out. The grip was green alder she had stained with rook-gall, the ferrule was brass turned on a chapel lathe, and every evening she sharpened it until the lamp smoked. Eli Boss, the pawnbroker on Fleet Row, had ordered it for a Friday collection and paid half in advance, and that half was the only thing keeping the rent paid.

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On Thursday night she sat with the blade across her knees and found she could not hand it over without something of her own in it. She scratched a heart into the flat of the steel, not a valentine, just the lopsided shape a child draws, and beneath it she copied out his name in the loose hand she had been practising all week on the back of the order slip. Her father said a blade with a sentiment on it was a blade nobody would buy. She said that was rather the point.

On Friday Eli turned the knife in the light from his window and grinned at his ledger. He pressed the point into his palm to test it, the way men do who have never once been cut by their own purchases, and a bead of red welled up and fell onto the brass scale pan. He laughed and said she had ground it too keen for his taste. Ada watched the drop spread across the metal and thought of the heart she had scratched, now bleeding on his counter where he could not miss it.

He paid the balance in silver without counting it. Ada walked home along Fleet Row with the coins heavy in her coat, and behind her the pawnbroker's sign swung on its hook, the paint flaking away letter by letter until only the first and last stayed legible in the wind.