Two traditional style dagger tattoos on calves: the left has a teal and red snake coiled around the blade, the right has a red rose with green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Daggers with snake and rose on two calves

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two healed or fresh traditional style tattoos sit side by side on a pair of lower legs. The left shows a black dagger with an orange crossguard and a teal snake with red and white markings wrapped around the blade, while the right shows a dagger with a red rose and dark green leaves behind it. Bold black outlines, solid fills and a plain white background give the composition a clear, flat presentation.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bride's father would not let the blade past the churchyard gate, so on the morning of the wedding the groom's mother wrapped it in a flour sack and carried it down Marrow Lane under her shawl. It was a black-hilted dagger with a crown of brass knobs, won at cards by the groom's grandfather from a travelling man who swore a snake lived in its grip.

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Nobody in Hollin Cross believed that until the sack came open beside the rose bush. The snake was grass-green and banded red and white like a ribbon from the summer fair, and it had been dozing in the hilt for longer than anyone could say. It lifted its head, looked along the lane at the bride's sister, and wound twice around the blade as though it had a bet on her.

The sister had been promised to the miller's son and had spent a whole summer hating every rose in the parish. She held out her hand, and the snake laid its chin on her knuckles, then slid off into the grass. Her father swore the blade was cursed. The bride laughed so hard she had to sit down on the wall.

The old men of Hollin Cross say the dagger went back into the flour sack that afternoon and was never seen again. The bride and groom were married for fifty-one years. Every spring after that, a single red rose was found tied to the lychgate with red and white thread, and nobody in the village ever admitted to tying it.

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