Black and grey tattoo flash design covering a phone case, with swallows, a moth, a compass, a rose, a microphone and chevrons in a traditional style.

Black and grey flash sheet of swallows and a moth

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A dense collage of hand-drawn tattoo flash designs printed in black ink on a white phone case, including two swallows, a central moth, a compass, a microphone, a rose and stacked chevrons. The linework is bold and sketchy, with hatched shading in the wings and petals. Short handwritten phrases and numbers are scattered between the motifs, and the design is shown in greyscale on a plain white background.

Traditional Botanical Swallow Moth Butterfly Compass Microphone Chevron Rose Leaves Astronaut Clock Script Flash sheet

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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

You arrive at Gull Rise on the last bus of September with a canvas bag and your father's brass compass, and Mrs Tolley at the door of number nine looks at the bag before she looks at you. The rooms are four shillings a night out of season, and she does not ask where you have come from, which suits you.

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The house smells of vinegar and damp wool. Under the eaves two swallows have been nesting all summer, and Mrs Tolley tells you they left on Tuesday without so much as a goodbye, as if birds owed rent. Each morning you walk the cliff path with a notebook, copying what the town says to itself. A man selling ices sings the same line about a place nobody knows. A girl on the pier keeps saying oops as sixpences drop through the boards, and laughs every time, as if losing money were the best part.

By the second week the notebook is full of other people's sentences. You stop writing your own address on the forms at the post office. The compass needle, which you have been tapping to make it behave, settles every evening pointing past the breakwater, and you begin to suspect your father was never lost, only sensible enough to stay put long enough to take a reading.

On the last morning you carry the bag down to the harbour wall. A swallow drops off the rail beside you, looks at the water, then the sky, and goes without circling once. You open the notebook to a blank page and write, underneath everything else, the only line that is yours: don't think I won't.