Traditional colour tattoo of a dagger piercing a red and cream skull with green leaves, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger through skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a gold cross guard and red grip runs diagonally through a cream skull with red eye sockets and red shading. Green leaves sit behind the blade, and faded tattoos are visible at the edges of the arm. The bold black outlines and flat colour fills are set against a shiny plastic backdrop.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Skull Leaves

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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 closer, the wind up here takes half of what I say, so you'll have to lean in for the part about the dagger. The cutler in Lower Orren had one blade left unfinished when the frost came, a long thin thing with a guard like crossed keys and a grip bound in red leather. He swore it could cut any lock in the valley. Nobody believed him, so he sold it cheap to the first traveller who didn't haggle.

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That traveller was a tax man called Hesketh Lorn, who had counted every sheep in three villages and never once counted his own debts. He rode this road with the dagger in his belt and a purse of coin he had no right to, meaning to cross before the snow shut the pass. Halfway up, a crow settled on his saddle and would not be moved. He threw stones. It came back. At the cairn by the old shrine he finally struck at it with the blade, and the bird dropped away, and beneath where it had been sat a skull, picked clean, with ivy growing through its eye sockets.

The skull had been a shepherd's, the one Lorn had pushed off the ledge over the summer for refusing to pay. The shepherd's boy had climbed up every day since with bread and found nothing but crows. Lorn tried to pull the blade free and could not. The red grip had gone hot as a coal, his fingers stuck to it, and the snow came down so thick that by morning the cairn was only a lump of white with a red gleam at its heart.

Men still tell that the dagger is up there yet, pinning that skull to the rock, and that every spring the ivy comes up green around the blade. Mind your purse on the way down. And if a crow asks for a lift, you say no.