Black and grey traditional dagger design with an ornate hilt and shaded blade, drawn on a white strip of paper over a dark wooden surface.

Ornate dagger flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A dagger drawn diagonally across a white paper strip, with a decorative hilt featuring scrolled quillons, a patterned grip and a pointed pommel. The blade is shaded with black fading to grey, with a faceted section near the tip and a central highlight line. The image is a monochrome drawing photographed on a dark wooden surface, with the paper filling most of the frame.

Traditional Dagger Sword Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smith at Harrowgate Quay would not forge a blade without first asking its purpose, and the dagger that came to him in the wet spring of the year the herring failed had a purpose that made him sit down on his stool. The widow Anneke Vell wanted it made from the iron of her husband's anchor chain, and she wanted the scrolls of the hilt worked so they curled like the foam off a bow wave. She did not say why. The smith did not ask twice.

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He worked nine nights by the forge light. He ground the blade long and narrow, then faceted the last hand's width so the point took the lamp like a cut stone. He shaded the steel from black at the spine to grey at the edge, the way the sea goes dark under a cloud and pale where the sun gets through. When the widow came for it she turned it over slowly and laid it on the bench without speaking, and he understood that she had wanted something she could hold without it holding her back.

She took the ferry across the bay that same evening, and the boatman said afterwards she sat in the stern with the dagger wrapped in oilcloth and never once unwrapped it. At the far shore she walked up to the chapel of Saint Brannoc, left the blade on the altar rail, and walked home again before the bell rang for compline.

The smith kept the chain's length he had cut away, and in the autumn a tar-black fishing boat came in under the harbour wall with a crew who had been three weeks lost. Their captain asked for a smith, and when he saw the workshop he went quiet and asked who had made the pommel with the little drop at its tip. The smith told him, and the captain nodded, and paid in silver, and did not say what the widow had carried to the altar.