Two aged, torn-edge sheets of vintage tattoo designs in grey line work, showing a woman's portrait, a dagger, roses, a bottle and a seated nude figure.

Vintage tattoo designs: woman, roses and dagger

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

Two aged, deckle-edged sheets carry printed tattoo designs drawn in grey line work with soft pencil-like shading. The left sheet shows a bust-length portrait of a woman with her hand raised to her head, with a seated nude figure seen from behind and a chair below. The right sheet shows a hand gripping a dagger, a cluster of roses with leaves and a stem, and a bottle and glass on a table, with faint pink tints in the roses.

Traditional Botanical Woman Portrait Dagger Hand Rose Leaves Bottle Glass Seated figure

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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

Pass the bread along and mind the candles, because I'll not tell this one twice. You see those two scraps of paper pinned behind the bar at the Anchor? Ida Penrose drew them in the back room of her shop on Church Street, the summer the herring boats came in short. Flash, she called it. Designs for sailors who came in with a shilling and wanted something to show their mothers.

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The woman with her hand to her head was Nell Carrick, who gutted fish in the net sheds and had no patience for anybody. She came in one wet Tuesday wanting a rose, just one, on the inside of her wrist. Ida said a rose was dull and offered her a dagger through a hand instead, the sort the Navy lads liked. Nell laughed so hard she knocked the bottle off the table. Glass everywhere, and the ink pot went over the seated lady on the other sheet, which is why there's a blot on her back to this day.

Ida never charged her for the rose. Instead she traced three roses onto oiled paper, one fading into the next, and Nell pressed her wrist to it and carried the print home under her shawl. Some weeks later she married Joseph Bray, the rope-maker's lad nobody thought would last a winter, and they had forty years of quarrels and one good dog.

So when you look at that dagger, don't think of murder. Think of a woman who asked for a rose and was teased into a better joke, and who kept the joke all her life. Now somebody fetch the Bray grandson a drink, because he's been staring at that hand since the vows.