Traditional style tattoo on a person's upper back showing a dagger with a golden hilt, an eye on the blade, red drops of blood and a skull below.

Dagger with eye and skull on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A dagger with a gold and green hilt is tattooed on each side of the upper back, with the blade on the right showing a red and yellow eye with a green iris. Small red drops of blood surround the blades, and a partly shaded skull with a rope or chain detail sits lower on the right. The bold black outlines and flat red, yellow, green and grey fills are set against a dark speckled background.

Traditional Back Dagger Eye Skull Blood drop Rope

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

Mr Abernethy kept the knives in a velvet tray under the counter of his pawnshop on Tanner Street, and I was only allowed to dust them on a Saturday. Two daggers lay side by side, gold hilts worn to a soft shine, blades black as wet slate. The right-hand one had an eye painted near the point, red lids, a green iris and a yellow ring, and Mr Abernethy said a sailor had brought it back from Valparaiso as payment for a debt nobody remembered. "Don't look it straight in the face," he told me. I looked at it every week anyway.

Keep reading

In the spring of 1956 a man came in off the Ferryhill road with a cough and a carpet bag. He wanted ten shillings for the eye dagger and didn't haggle, which Mr Abernethy found more suspicious than any haggling would have been. When the bell over the door had stopped ringing, Mr Abernethy took the knife out, turned it to the lamp and went quiet. "Those drops," he said, pointing at the little red beads painted around the blades, "were not there last time." I laughed at him. He didn't laugh back.

The man came in again the following Tuesday, the cough gone, and asked for the knife back. He put the ten shillings on the counter one coin at a time, then stood a moment too long looking at the eye. "It doesn't sleep," he said, and went out without waiting for his change.

That night I took the knife from the tray myself and wiped it with a soft cloth. The eye was open, as it always had been, and the red drops around it were dry and bright as cherries. I put it back beside the other one, blade to blade, and left the lamp on in the back room, which Mr Abernethy never did.