Black and white flash sheet of fourteen tattoo designs, including Chinese characters for health, wisdom and love, a bagua, and a mystic knot, each with a printed English label.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chinese symbol flash sheet with labelled motifs

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white flash sheet arranged in a grid of fourteen panels, each showing a bold brush-style Chinese character or a symbolic motif such as a bagua, a knot, a coin design and a circular lattice emblem. Each panel has a small printed English label beneath it, including health, longevity, prosperity, love, peace, wisdom, gratitude and good luck coins. The linework is solid and uniform, with no shading, set against a plain white background.

Love Yin yang Peace Water Chinese character

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

The dough has been proving since midnight, and your uncle has already wiped the steel table twice before you arrive with flour on your sleeves. He doesn't look up. He nods at the rows of bean paste buns cooling on the rack and at the ink pot beside them, the one with the cracked lid, and says the character for longevity must go on each top before the oven door opens, or the buns are just buns.

Keep reading

Your first attempts sit in a bin behind the counter, thick as bread crust where the brush pooled. He shows you again: the long horizontal first, then the hook that must lift away like a bird off a wire. The water character is harder, all sweep and drag, and you learn to dip the brush twice and tap it dry against the rim. The old wooden stamp with the eight trigrams hangs on a nail above the sink, and he never uses it on Tuesdays, though nobody has ever asked him why. Outside, the shutter is still down, and the street is so quiet you can hear the water running in the gutter.

By four o'clock your hand has steadied. You do the prosperity character on the last tray without him watching, and when you look up he is standing at the flour bin with his back to you, one palm flat on the lid. He says the first owner painted gratitude on the shutter in 1974, and the paint has been coming off ever since, which is why every morning someone has to put it back.

The first van turns into the lane with its headlights on. You carry the tray out, buns lined up with their characters facing the street, and one with a smear where you lifted too early. He takes it from you, bites it in half, and hands you the other piece while the driver waves through the glass.