Traditional tattoo with dotwork shaded hand reaching upward beside a dagger, a small flower and a bird, on the arm near the elbow.

Stippled hand with dagger and bird

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dotwork-shaded hand reaches upward, its wrist finished with a scalloped black cuff, with a dagger on the left and a flower bud on a thin stem to the right. Bold black outlines frame the hand, with stippled grey shading across the skin, while the dagger hilt and the bird at the bottom add touches of red, yellow and green. The design fills the centre of the frame, with more tattoo work visible at the top and bottom edges.

Traditional Dotwork Upper arm Hand Dagger Flower Bird Droplet

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

You have the oven door open before the church clock finishes, and the heat comes out at your face like something that has been waiting all night to be let out. Flour on your forearms, the lame lies on the steel bench where you left it, the short blade your aunt called the dagger. Three hundred loaves are proving under damp cloths, and every one of them seems to be breathing.

Keep reading

It is the reaching that gets you. Up to the top shelf for the tin of salt, up for the blind cord that sticks. Your aunt used to say the trick was to score the dough the way you would open a letter, quick and without apology, so the crust can open where it wants to. You learned that before you learned to read, and you still do it with your eyes half shut.

At half five a bird lands on the sill outside, a dark thing with a green sheen at the throat, and it watches you through the glass while you slide the first batch onto the board. Drops of condensation hang on the pane and catch the light from the ovens. You tap the glass. The bird does not move. Outside, the first bus grinds past and the sky over the car park goes the colour of weak tea.

You pull the last tray and it sings as the crust cracks. On the windowsill the pot of bud you forgot to water has finally split, one pale petal showing, and you think you will have to tell someone about it, though not yet. Bread first. When you look up again the bird has gone, and the only thing left on the sill is a smear of marks where its feet stood in the damp.