Colour traditional-style tattoo of a dagger with a green gem on the hilt and a red pommel, sitting on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional dagger on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dagger runs diagonally down the forearm, with its blade pointing towards the wrist and a curled gold crossguard near the hilt. The outlines are bold and black, with orange and brown shading along the blade and a green gem and red accents on the handle. The tattoo fills the upper part of the frame against plain skin and a grey sleeve.

Traditional Forearm Dagger Knife Gem Blade Hilt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down by the range and stop fidgeting, the lot of you, because this is the one about Tobias Penhale and the knife that would not stay in its sheath. You've heard it wrong at the Crown, so hear it right from me.

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The knife had come down from his grandfather, who cut coal from the Cwm seam with it for forty years and never once sharpened it on a Sunday. The blade had gone the colour of weak tea from the damp. The crossguard was brass that some vain fellow in a Bristol shop had gilded, and it curled at the ends like a fern that had thought better of growing. In the pommel sat a green stone the size of a robin's egg, cut flat. The men said it was glass, and the men were fools, because glass does not warm in your palm when the lamp goes out.

One November the roof in the eastern drift gave way, and Tobias was under the fall with two boys and a lamp that would not stay lit. He could not see the wall. He could only feel the old dagger, which he had driven into the seam without thinking, and the stone was humming against his thumb like a kettle that had not yet decided to boil. He followed the hum. It led him along a crack no wider than his hand and out into the cold air of the level, where the rescue men were already shouting his name.

The knife went back in its sheath that night and never came out again to cut anything. Tobias hung it over the door, point down, the way you'd hang a horseshoe for luck. The boys who lived through it grew old and quarrelsome, and not one of them would ever tell you the stone was glass.