Black and grey flash sheet of gothic tattoo designs including a moth, owl, ghost, coffin, dagger, cat and crossed bones, drawn in dotwork and bold outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey gothic flash sheet

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of many small designs arranged across a white background, including a ghost, a cross, a candle, a potion bottle marked XXX, a tombstone reading HOPES DREAMS, a large death's head moth, an owl on a branch, a black cat, a coffin, a dagger, an eye and a crescent moon. The linework is bold and outlined, with shading built from stippled dots and solid black fills. The sheet is entirely black and grey, with the designs spaced evenly and some small filler motifs such as stars and drips between them.

Dotwork Blackwork Ghost Cross Candle Tombstone Moth Owl Cat Skull Dagger Coffin Bone Eye Mushroom Crescent moon Lip Heart Lollipop Branch Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy wanted the coffin carried out through the kitchen, not the front door, because the front door had swelled shut the winter her husband died. We took the back way, four of us, the box tilting against the scullery frame while the snow fell past the lamp and an owl somewhere in the orchard asked the same question over and over.

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Upstairs, on the dresser, stood the bottle he had sold from the cart for thirty years, the glass thick and green, the label still marked XXX in his square hand. She had kept one back, she said, for the nights the cold got into the joints. Out past the apple trees the stone was already set, grey and new, with HOPES and DREAMS cut into it too shallow for the rain to find. She had paid the mason extra for the shallowness. She said a deep carving only gave the weather something to argue with.

When we lifted the coffin onto the trestles it was lighter than it had any right to be, and nobody said so. Mrs Abernethy only pulled the lid aside, looked in at the folded blanket and the clean pillow, and nodded as if a bill had come in correctly. Then she sent me to the sill for the bottle. A moth the size of a man's hand was beating against the lamp, its skull-marked back pale in the light, and the black cat that had followed us from the barn sat watching it with the patience of a creditor.

"Pour it on the step," she said. "He always said the frost was the only honest customer he ever had." I did. The liquid went black on the white stone, and the moth dropped down out of the lamplight and settled in it, wings opening slowly, as though it had been waiting all winter for someone to ask.