Black ink flash drawing of an ornate dagger with two roses and a scrolled banner, drawn on cream paper with no body placement shown.

Dagger with roses and banner

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an ornate dagger with a decorative pommel and cross guard, flanked by two open roses and a scrolled banner with illegible lettering. The blade and handle are shaded with fine stippling and cross-hatching, and the scrollwork is drawn in clean outline. The design is in black ink on cream paper, with faint dotted guidelines forming a diamond behind the blade.

Neo-trad Dotwork Dagger Rose Banner Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty winters ago the smith at Marrowgate was asked to make a blade that could not be lied to, and he took the commission because the woman asking had paid in silver and in roses, the red ones that only grow on the cliffs above the salt marsh. He worked the steel for nine days. On the tenth he fixed the cross guard with two little hooks, so the blade could catch a sleeve and hold a man still while it was judged. Then he bound the grip in fine ribbon, shaded it with a thousand small dots and crossing lines so that it looked like the night sky over the marsh, and he carved a banner beneath the roses with words nobody in the valley could read, because the words were not for them.

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When the woman came back she did not look at the blade. She looked at the roses and asked whether they would wilt. The smith said that anything pressed into metal keeps its shape longer than anything that grows, and she laughed and said that was the most honest thing she had heard in a year. She took the dagger and went up the cliff path in the rain, the dotted lines of the old survey still pencilled faintly on the table where she had left her plans.

People in Marrowgate say the blade is still in the hills. They say that if you hold it to the light at dusk, the diamond the smith drew around it appears on the wall of whatever room you are standing in, and that everyone who stands inside it has to answer one question truthfully before the light goes. Nobody will tell you the question. The smith never did, and he kept the roses on the blade as a warning, because a rose that is cut and still looks alive is the hardest thing in the world to lie beside.