Hand-drawn flash sheet titled Actions and Senses, with black line drawings inside circles, each labelled with an action or sense word such as Travel, Fall, See and Smell.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Actions and senses flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn sheet titled Actions and Senses, arranged as a grid of circles, each containing a small simple line drawing and a handwritten label such as Travel, Run, Fall, See, Touch, Listen and Smell. The linework is thin and sketchy, with some areas shaded in solid black. The drawings are in black ink on a cream, aged paper background, and the composition is evenly spaced across the page.

Circle Sketch Travel Fire Flight

Find an artist for this

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

Abel Croft kept his drawings in a biscuit tin under the stove on the narrowboat Kestrel Rose, and when the ice locked the Oxford Cut that January he laid them out on the table one by one. Each was a ring of ink with a small figure inside doing something: a man running, a bird falling, a woman with her hand against a kettle. His daughter Nell, nine years old and nobody's idea of quiet, pointed at the one with a bell and asked what it was for. "Listening," he said. "The ring is the world you can reach. The rest is just the inside of your head."

Keep reading

Nell thought this was nonsense and said so. She went out along the frozen towpath with her skates tied to her boots, past the lock keeper's cottage and the mill, and she tried each action in turn. She ran until her lungs hurt, let herself fall on purpose onto the gravel, and held a sparrow in her cupped hands until it stopped struggling. Every circle, she found, was fuller than the drawing. The fall had grit in it. The bell had a dog barking three fields off and the tick of cooling iron.

On the ninth day the ice cracked in the middle of the reach, and a fishing boy went through near the bridge. Nell heard the splash before she saw it, lay flat the way her father had taught her, and reached him with the boathook. She could not remember deciding anything. That night she found the drawings out on the table again, and her father was bent over the fall circle with his pen.

He said nothing about the boy. He drew a new ring beside the others, put a boathook inside it, and wrote beneath it in his square hand: Also true.