Coloured flash drawing of a white mask, a red rose, green leaves and a dagger, with a banner reading Ideas are bulletproof, in a traditional style.

Mask, rose and dagger with banner design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A black-outlined drawing of a white mask with a thin moustache and rosy cheeks, set beside a large red rose with green leaves and a dagger running diagonally behind it. Two banners cross the lower half of the design, and the lettering on them reads Ideas are bulletproof. The linework is bold and the shading is pencil-like, with pink, red and green colour and light grey tones on the mask.

Traditional Mask Rose Dagger Banner Leaves Lettering

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

The constable climbed the stairs at the third bell with the warrant folded in one glove and an old dagger tucked behind his belt, the way his father had carried one. Hester Vane had hung a painted mask in the shop window where the ribbon bolts usually went, its rosy cheeks turned toward the street, and a red rose pinned beneath its chin. Anyone who knew the signs knew the press was running that night.

Keep reading

Inside, the air tasted of linseed and hot lead. Hester stood at the frame with ink to her wrists and did not look up. The constable tore open the cabinets, shook out the damp sheets from the drying line and read them aloud in a flat voice, because he had been told to. IDEAS ARE BULLETPROOF, they said in heavy black letters above a crude drawing of a rose. He found the forme locked, the type cases full, and a stack of unsold broadsheets that smelled faintly of the river.

He carried the sheets down to the cart himself and found the lane outside already speaking the words. A boy on the kerb was chanting them to a dog. A woman at the pump repeated a line while she filled her pail. By the time the cart reached the square, the sheets in his arms were the least of what he had seized.

Before dawn he pinned one copy to his own front door, beside the lock, and went to bed. His wife read it aloud at breakfast, slowly, to see whether it would still sound true in daylight. It did.