Black dotwork flash sheet showing a rose, a snake, a dagger, a praying hand, an angel, a cross and church buildings, shown as tattoo designs with no placement on the body.

Dotwork flash sheet of churches, snakes and hands

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of black ink flash designs arranged across a white background, including churches, a coiled snake, a rose on a stem, a dagger, outstretched hands, an angel with wings and a cross. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots, giving the images a tonal, engraved look. The sheet is entirely black and grey with no colour, and the designs are spaced evenly so each could be chosen separately.

Dotwork Blackwork Snake Rose Dagger Hand Angel Cross Eye Sword Bed Wheel Castle Figure

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 lorry came up to the barrier at ten past three with its hazard lights still blinking, which told me the driver had been sitting in the queue longer than he wanted anyone to know. I waved him into bay four and pulled on my gloves while the rain came sideways off the river.

Keep reading

Inside the trailer there were forty crates of tinned peaches and a single biscuit tin on a pallet by the door. The declaration said personal effects, religious. I opened it. A grass snake lay coiled in the tin, dried flat and pale as an old shoelace, its jaw resting on its own tail. Someone had given it two black beads for eyes and they had gone grey with dust. Nothing about it was contraband. It was just a snake, and my form had no box for that.

Teodor said it had been his grandmother's. She kept it on the windowsill of a house above the river at Sarnic, and when she left the village in 1968 she carried it in the lining of her coat. She told him a coiled thing keeps whatever it is wrapped around from leaving. The guards at that crossing had been too frightened of the snake to look under the lining, so she got through with it, and she never went back.

I asked him why he was bringing it over now. He said she had died in March and the priest wanted her buried with something from home. He didn't say the rest, that she had spent fifty years holding on to a place she could not go back to. I stamped the form, ran my thumb over the dry scales, and closed the lid so the tail stayed where it was. In the margin, in pencil where nobody would check, I wrote: released, on the understanding it is going home.