Colour traditional dagger tattoo with a teal, red and orange flower and dotwork shading on a limb, shown in three side-by-side panels.

Traditional dagger and flower

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A dagger with a striped brown handle and round pommel runs vertically, its blade crossing a large teal and red flower with black and white outlines. Bold black linework is surrounded by stippled dotwork shading, and the petals use blended grey and teal tones. The image is a three-panel composition showing the same tattoo repeated across the limb against a dark background.

Traditional Dotwork Other Dagger Flower Knife Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had taken the outer mooring before midnight, and by first light the Constance was dragging her chain toward the breakwater with only Nell Varley aboard to answer for her. Nell had her father's knife in her belt, the one with the striped wooden grip he turned on the lathe behind the chandlery the winter she was born. Its round brass pommel knocked against her hip as she went forward over the wet deck.

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The warp had jammed under the bow roller, twisted like a wrung-out rope, and nobody on the quay could reach her. Nell knelt on the foredeck with spray stinging her eyes and worked the blade under the strands. Her father had painted the teal bloom on the wheelhouse door the summer before the Avalon went down off the Scarrow, petals rimmed in white, a red heart the size of a fist. She kept thinking of it, which was foolish, because the knife needed her hands and not her memory.

The strands parted with a crack like a shot. The Constance swung, the chain roared out through the hawse, and she rode free into the lee of the wall while the whole harbour cheered at a volume she could not hear over her own breath.

Afterwards the harbourmaster asked where she had learned to do that. Nell wiped the blade on her trousers and said nothing. She went to the wheelhouse and looked at the flower until the paint blurred, then left the knife on the sill, where the morning light found the brass and the stripes in the grain, and went out to see who had stayed on the quay to watch.