Neo-trad tattoo on a thigh showing a black handprint, a dagger, a red rose, a cloth sack and a rolled scroll with drips of blood.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Handprint, dagger and rose on a thigh

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black handprint sits at the top of this tattoo, with a dagger with a brown handle cutting diagonally down the design. Below and beside the blade are a red rose, a tied cloth sack and a rolled scroll with a red ribbon, with small drips of red at the bottom. The bold dark outlines and smooth shading on the rose and sack are typical of neo-traditional work, and the colour is mostly red, brown and grey with the handprint in solid black.

Neo-trad Other Dagger Rose Scroll Ribbon Blood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Maud Agnes mentioned the sack until we were past the Ness, when Skipper Harrow dragged it from under the bench and set it on the fish boxes like a christening gift. It was heavier than it looked. Coins shifted inside with a sound I knew from my nan's biscuit tin, and the rope at its neck was stiff with salt and old wax.

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The scroll had come aboard at Whitby with the dead man's gear, rolled tight and bound with a red ribbon that nobody would untie. Harrow had pressed his palm flat to the cabin door the night he read it, and the print dried black on the paint, four fingers and a thumb. Dolly, who had buried two husbands and thought nothing of gutting bream, said the ribbon was a debt and the debt had come aboard with us.

Ten miles out the wind swung north and the lamp caught the blade of the gutting knife. Harrow looked at me, then at the sack, then at the black water. "Cut the rope," he said. "Count it." I took the knife but cut the ribbon instead, and read the name inked on the paper. It was his own, and under it a date only three days off.

Harrow laughed the way men laugh at weather. He lifted the sack, tipped the coins over the rail one at a time, and watched them go down without a splash. We docked at dawn with nothing but salt in the hold. He lived to be old and never once went out past the Ness again. Every spring after, a rose-red slick of foam spread off the Maud Agnes's wake where the coins had gone down.