Tombstone – Handmade Damascus Arkansas Toothpick Bowie Knife with Camel Bone Scrimshaw, Brass Spine & Green G10 Handle

The Tombstone Arkansas Toothpick

This is the longest, meanest profile in the knife world, and I built it the way it was meant to be built. The Tombstone is a full-tang Arkansas toothpick bowie knife with a 12-inch VG10 Damascus blade, a brass spine strip, a forged Damascus guard and pommel, and a green G10 handle inlaid with hand-engraved camel bone. At 18 inches overall, it's a statement piece — the kind of blade you hang on the wall and the kind you'd never want to be on the wrong end of.

The Arkansas toothpick goes back to the American frontier. It started as a long, needle-pointed dueling and fighting blade in the 1800s, the big brother to the bowie, and it never left the American imagination. It's the same long Old West toothpick profile that later found fame on the big screen in modern action films like The Expendables. I'd wanted to forge a proper one for years, and this is it — in real Damascus, not a mirror-polished factory blank.

Who makes it

Every Stag Steel blade is forged by hand by Naqash Minhas, our founder and master maker, who's been forging since 2001. The Tombstone isn't assembled from bought-in parts. Naqash forges the blade, the guard, and the pommel from Damascus, grinds it, heat treats it, and finishes it by hand in our Canadian shop. When you buy one of these, you're buying one man's hand work, not a production run.

The blade — VG10 Damascus that won't rust on you

Most of the toothpicks you'll find for sale, on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, are carbon 1095 Damascus. They look the part, but they rust the first time you forget to wipe them down, and they sit soft at 55 to 58 HRC. I went a different way. The Tombstone's blade is VG10 Damascus, a stainless Damascus that resists rust the way carbon never will, with a hard VG10 cutting steel running the edge.

The pattern you see is real, folded and forge-welded into the steel, not etched on top. A polished brass strip runs the length of the spine, the way the old toothpicks carried a brass back, and it sets the Damascus off beautifully against the dark pattern. Prefer a single-steel workhorse over Damascus? We also build this same toothpick in a D2 steel version — same profile and frame, a tough tool-steel blade instead of the layered pattern

How the Damascus is forged

This is where a real handmade blade separates from the imports. Naqash starts by stacking two contrasting steels into a billet, then forge-welds them at welding heat, a bright orange-yellow, under the press. He draws that bar out, folds it back on itself, and welds it again, and every fold doubles the layer count, climbing from a handful of layers to hundreds. How the bar is worked, drawn straight or pressed, decides the flowing pattern you see. Only once the pattern is right does he forge it to the toothpick profile and grind in the bevels.

The heat treat — the part that actually matters

Here's the thing nobody selling cheap Damascus wants to talk about: a blade is only as good as its heat treat. A stunning pattern on a soft blade is jewellery, not a knife. After grinding, Naqash hardens the blade and tempers it back to a working hardness of 59 to 61 HRC at the edge, hard enough to take and hold a keen edge, tempered enough not to be brittle in a blade this long. The pattern tells you nothing about how a knife performs. The heat treat tells you everything, and ours is done right, by hand, every time. Then the blade is polished and etched in a mild acid, which darkens one steel and leaves the other bright, and the Damascus pattern rises to the surface.

Damascus guard, Damascus pommel

This is where the Tombstone leaves the factory pieces behind. The guard and the pommel are both forged Damascus, out of the same steel family as the blade. Most production toothpicks, including the famous movie ones, use plain stainless furniture. Forging the guard and pommel in Damascus is more work and more steel, and it ties the whole knife together so it reads as one forged piece from tip to butt.

Specifications

• Knife Name: Tombstone Arkansas Toothpick (full tang)
• Blade Steel: VG10/15N20 Damascus (stainless)
• Blade Hardness: 59–61 HRC (hand heat-treated)
• Blade Style: Arkansas toothpick / double-edge dagger profile
• Blade Length: 12 inches
• Spine: Polished brass strip
• Guard & Pommel: Forged Damascus
• Handle: Green G10 with camel bone scrimshaw inlay, 6 inches
• Overall Length: 18 inches
• Sheath: Brown premium leather with belt loop

The handle — green G10 and a story in camel bone

The handle is green G10, about the toughest handle material there is. It won't crack, swell, rot, or move on you in heat or wet, and the green has real depth in the light. Set into each side is an oval of genuine camel bone, hand-engraved in the scrimshaw tradition with a crow perched on a skull. That artwork is why the knife earned the name Tombstone. It's old-world detail on a frontier blade, the kind of touch you don't get on a stamped production piece. If you like our green-handled builds, this knife sits right alongside the green G10 on our Rambo-style bowie knife and the Crocodile Dundee bowie knife — same tough handle material, same hand-finished feel, three very different blades.

The sheath

The Tombstone ships in a hand-stitched brown premium leather sheath with a secure belt loop and a snap strap over the guard. It's built heavy to carry a blade this size, tooled and stitched to last, and made to show the knife off as much as protect it.

Made by hand in Canada 

We've been forging at Stag Steel Knives since 2001, and every blade is forged, ground, heat treated, and finished by hand in our Canadian shop. That's the line between this and the mass-produced toothpicks: real Damascus, real camel bone, real forged furniture, real heat treat, one knife at a time. If you've been after a Damascus Arkansas toothpick for sale that's a cut above the movie replicas and the carbon-steel imports, the Tombstone is it. It's also earned its place in our roundup of the best bowie knives for collectors this year.

It lives in our Damascus bowie knives collection and among our wider bowie knives, where the big frontier blades belong. New to this kind of steel? Our maker breaks it all down in what a Damascus knife really is, and even though this VG10 blade resists rust, a collector blade this nice deserves good habits — our guide on how to care for a Damascus knife keeps the pattern and the brass right for decades. 

One at a time means this exact knife is the only one of its kind. When it's gone, the next toothpick won't carry the same bone, the same pattern, or the same crow. Free shipping across Canada, with affordable shipping rates to the USA and worldwide.