Black ink flash sheet of traditional-style designs including hands, daggers, a skull, a rose and a candle, drawn on white paper.

Black ink flash sheet of hands, daggers and skulls

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black ink flash drawings on white paper, showing a skull, several hands, daggers with drips, a candle, a rose, a chalice, towers, a branch and a head with a plaited hairstyle. The designs use bold outlines with fine hatching and stippled dotwork in the shading. The sheet is composed as a loose grid of separate designs, each isolated on the page.

Traditional Dotwork Skull Hand Dagger Candle Rose Tower Eye Cross Branch Praying hands Head Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night Mr Pringle's dog came home without him, my mother lit every candle in the chapel of St Brannoc and told me not to touch the silver chalice on the altar, which was older than the town itself. I was eleven and wanted to know why the church smelt of wax and vinegar at once.

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The knife grinder had come through Penhallow that week, a thin man named Vosper who set his wheel against the churchyard wall and sang while he worked. He had a sheet of drawings he showed to anyone who stopped: a hand with an eye opened in its palm, a dagger wound round with ribbon, a tower with its onion cap, drops falling from every point like rain on a slate roof. He said the hands told you what you owed. "Everybody in this town owes somebody," he said, spitting on his stone. "The blade is only the bill."

My father had not come home from the quarry on the Thursday. On the Sunday the men carried a rope of wet cloth up from the cliff path, and Vosper stood at the lychgate with his cap in his hands and did not sing. He asked my mother for nothing. He only looked at the chalice, then at the candles, and then at the three drips of wax already hardening on the altar step.

I went out at dusk and found the wheel still turning in the lane, though no one was working it. The stone was wet. Someone had left a single candle burning in the window of the tower, and beneath it, pressed into the mud, the print of a hand, fingers spread as if asking for something back.