Black and grey fine line and dotwork dagger tattoo with an ornate hilt and dotted trailing lines, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dagger with dotted chain on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dagger with an ornate cross guard and pommel is shown in the centre of the image, with a fine chain-like string of dots trailing above and below it. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dotwork used for the hilt detail and the dotted lines, and the blade is filled with shading. The tattoo is in black and grey on the inner forearm, photographed straight on against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Dagger Sword Hilt Chain Dot Ornament

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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

Mind the step, there, it's worn through in the middle like everything else in this city. Sit by the brazier and I'll tell you how the Vesper Dagger came to hang over the river gate, because the gatekeeper's daughter swore it was the only honest thing left in Harrowmere. Her name was Ilse Brannock, and she could count a coin by ear in the dark. When the guild of chain-makers took her father's workshop for debts, she walked up to the Lantern Court with a ledger under one arm and a bag of dried pears under the other, and she waited three days for the Warden to come down the stairs.

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On the fourth morning he did. He was a tall, careful man who wore gloves even to eat, and he asked what a girl could possibly want from the council. She said she wanted the chain back, every link of it, and she said the dagger too, the old one with the cross-guard like a pair of spectacles, because her father had forged the pommel himself and never been paid for it. The Warden laughed. Ilse didn't. She laid the ledger open on his desk and read him the sums in a voice that carried right down to the kitchens.

They gave her the dagger, in the end, as a joke. Hung it on a nail above the river gate, point down, with a string of dotted beads trailing from the hilt where the chain should have been. Men still touch it on the way out to the marshes, for luck. Ilse never got the chain back. But the ledger was read aloud in the square, and that, she told anyone who'd listen, was a better sort of metal to be paid in.