Traditional style tattoo of a dagger through a red rose with black leaves, a chain and a bird on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger through rose and chain on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm shows a dagger piercing a red rose with black leaf shapes beneath it, with a grey chain running across the upper arm. Other tattoos sit above and below, including a bird design at the bottom and a black floral shape near the elbow. Bold black outlines and solid fills are used throughout, with red, orange and yellow accents against grey and black shading, set against a paved street background.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Rose Chain Bird Leaves Flower

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

The chain went through the gate at Tollbridge Reach the same hour the last ferry pulled out, and nobody on the quay looked up from their crates. Mags Okonedo said it would hold. She had a tin of rust-eating paste and a voice like a gull, and she said anything would hold if you believed it hard enough, which was how she talked the harbour board into letting us keep the pumphouse.

Keep reading

We worked through the night on the lock. The dagger was my grandfather's, a long bronze thing from before the water came up, its hilt wrapped in red thread gone brown. Mags wanted it for the rose. She said the rose had been in the old ink books, the ones printed on paper that still didn't drown, and that a rose pinned clean through was the only honest thing anyone had ever sold on this coast. I didn't argue. I kept glancing at the crows roosting on the gantries, black and patient, watching which boats came back low in the water.

By dawn the chain was cut and the gate swung open under its own weight. We stood on the wet stone and listened to the sea come through the gap, loud as a market, and Mags laughed until she coughed. The rose still sat on the dagger's point in my mind, red as a warning lamp. "Well," she said, wiping her hands on her coat, "that's us paid up." I told her the dagger had always been for cutting bread. She said bread was what the rose was for.