Traditional style colour tattoo of a red rose, a dagger with a yellow ribbon and a small skull on a forearm, with stars and leaves around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional rose and dagger on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a red rose with green leaves sits across the forearm, with a blue and silver dagger running diagonally through it and a yellow ribbon curling around the hilt. A small red and grey skull sits at the lower right, and black star shapes are scattered across the surrounding skin. The bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are typical of traditional American style, and the photograph is taken close up against a pale, blurred background.

Traditional Forearm Rose Dagger Ribbon Skull Leaves Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman at Saltcombe kept his bell on a nail by the slipway, and every evening he rang it twice for the boats that were still out past the breakwater. His daughter Mairi had a red rose painted on the door of the net store, and beneath it a dagger she said was for keeping the gulls honest. Nobody in town believed the gulls were the problem.

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The winter the herring failed, a stranger came off the mail boat with a canvas bag and a pocket full of silver. He asked for passage to the Skerry Light, and when the ferryman said the light was dark and the rocks were worse, the stranger laid a little skull of carved bone on the bench between them and said it was payment enough. The ferryman had never seen bone so red. He took the boat out anyway, because the stranger's hands were steady and the sea was flat as a plate.

They came back at dusk with no stranger and no bag. Mairi stood at the slipway with a lantern and counted the boats, and when she reached the last one she found a yellow ribbon tied around the mooring ring, knotted three times the way her mother used to tie her hair. She untied it, folded it into her apron, and went up to the store to paint the stars back on the wall where the rain had taken them.

The bell rang twice that night, though nobody had touched the rope. Mairi did not go down to listen. She knew the sound was only the tide working the iron against the nail, and she knew that in the morning the stranger's boat would be tied at the slipway, empty and dry, waiting for its next fare.