Traditional-style flash drawing of a blue and gold dagger piercing a red rose with green leaves, shown on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger through a rose flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold, outlined drawing of a dagger with a blue grip, gold crossguard and grey blade, driven point first into a red rose. Two green leaves sit either side of the flower, and a red tip extends below it. The thick black outlines, flat fills and solid colour are typical of traditional American tattoo flash, and the design is centred on a plain white background.

Traditional Dagger Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had put a skin on the yard trough, and Ada Lowther broke it with the heel of her boot before she thought to look for the stick her uncle kept for the job. Instead her fingers found something in the feed bin behind the mineral buckets: a bundle of oilcloth, stiff as card, tied with baler twine. Inside lay a dagger with a blue grip ribbed like a lighthouse, a gold crossguard, and a grey blade gone dull with grease.

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Nobody had mentioned it. Uncle Walt never mentioned much, and the farm had its own quiet way of keeping things, a bottle behind the Aga, a coat left on a nail for a man who had been dead for years. She turned the dagger over. Near the hilt, scratched into the steel with a nail, were the letters J.L. and a date from before she was born. Beyond the fence the ewes were calling across the top field, and the rose by the back door had lost every leaf but two, green and stubborn against the wall.

She carried the blade out to the rose bed. The bush had been her aunt's. Every spring it came back red, and every winter Walt cut it to the ground and swore at it. Ada knelt in the frozen mulch and tested the soil with the point. It went in more easily than she expected, as if the earth had been waiting. She meant only to bury it out of sight, but when she pressed harder the blade slid down and stopped against something solid: a tin box, rusted shut, its lid stamped with the same initials.

She did not open it. She left the dagger standing upright in the bed, the blue grip catching the low sun, and walked back across the yard to find the stick for the trough. The ice had already begun to close over the water again, and she broke it anyway.