Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Black and grey tattoo flash sheet
Black and grey · Flash
A sheet of separate black and grey tattoo designs arranged on a white background, including a songbird, pocket watch, skull, anchor, sailing ship, moth, butterfly and daisy. The linework is fine and engraved, with some areas of stippling and cross-hatching for shading. The designs are spaced evenly with no overlap, so each can be viewed on its own.
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
Ruth had been at the biscuit tin for three nights before she noticed the gaps. Uncle Alf had cut every picture out of his old almanacs with nail scissors, a songbird, a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a skull, an anchor, a moth the size of a thumbprint, and kept them in a tin painted with geese under the sink. Each one was glued to a square of card and labelled in his square capitals on the back. Nothing was missing from the cards. What was missing were the things they seemed to point to: a shed key, a compass rose, a clef with no piano to go with it.
Keep reading
On the fourth night she found the drawer at the bottom of the dresser, behind the tea towels. It held a brass key with a clover-shaped bit, three black buttons off a sailor's coat, and a scrap of felt cut in the shape of a moustache that nobody had ever explained. None of it fitted a door in the house. On Saturday she carried the key down the allotment in her coat pocket, past the leeks and the scarecrow in a borrowed bowler, to the padlocked shed at the end of the row.
The lock turned on the first try, which felt like a rebuke. Inside, on a bench under a window gone green at the corners, lay a compass rose drawn in soft pencil and a stack of blank cards. Above them, pinned to the wall, was a calendar with a ship under full sail, the same ship as on the card marked SHIP in the tin. He had been planning something. The last card on the pile had nothing printed on it at all, only a faint ring where he had once set down a mug.
She sat for a long time with a pencil in her hand. Then she drew a daisy, badly, with too many petals, and glued it to the lid of the tin where he would have wanted it. Underneath she wrote her own name in capitals.
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