Black and grey flash design of a dagger piercing a heart with a wavy ribbon across it and three drops below, in a traditional style with no body placement shown.

Dagger through a heart with ribbon

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A dagger with a ribbed grip and round pommel pierces a heart from the top, with its blade running down through the heart and out at the bottom. A wavy ribbon wraps across the middle of the heart, and three drops sit beneath the point. The design uses bold black outlines with stippled grey shading on a plain white background, and it has no colour.

Traditional Dagger Heart Ribbon Drop Blade

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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 down, the lot of you. The bus is late, the guard has gone off for his tea, and you may as well hear how the blade came over Sorrel Ford. The customs men won't tell you it happened, but the river remembers.

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Old Tamsin Gale made knives for the ferrymen there, and she never sold one without a length of blue ribbon knotted under the pommel. Her husband Jory had gone across the water with a boat full of salt and never come back. She swore over her forge that whoever carried one of her blades over the ford would carry his name with it, and that the ribbon would be the proof.

Years later a corporal named Eli Strand stopped a cart at the crossing and found a bundle under the seat. Inside was the dagger with its ribbed grip and its round brass head. He weighed it in his palm and asked whose it was. The carter, a boy of twelve or so, said it was his grandmother's, and that she had asked him to take it to the far bank, where somebody would know the knot. Strand turned the blade over and saw three small rust-coloured drops gathered at the point, stubborn as the day they fell. He thought of the blue ribbon on his own mother's bonnet and of the salt boat that never came home.

He let the cart through. When the boy untied the knot on the far side, the ribbon still said Jory, in her small careful stitches. Mind the step as you go out. The drop is steeper than it looks.