Blue line drawing of two sleeve designs in a neo-traditional style, showing a skull, a dragon, a rose, flames, a bird, a tattoo machine and the words Love and Hate.

Dragon and skull sleeve flash sheet

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The image shows two tall sleeve designs drawn in blue ink on a white background. The left panel has a rose at the top, a dragon coiled around a skull, and brass knuckles at the base, while the right panel has flames, a bird, a skull, a tattoo machine and the words Love and Hate. The linework is fine and detailed with hatched shading, and the drawing is monochrome blue with no body part visible.

Neo-trad Skull Dragon Rose Flame Bird Tattoo machine Love Script

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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 tattooist arrives on the last train in October with a holdall, a rolled bundle of blue drawings and a cough he says is only sea air. Mrs Pargeter gives him the back room above the bakery because it has the one radiator that knocks in tune, and you are the one sent up each morning with his tea. The drawings are pinned inside his wardrobe door: a dragon wound round a skull, a bird with its beak open in a burst of flame, and across the bottom two words in looping script that you pretend not to read.

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He lets you watch him work at the kitchen table one wet Sunday, the machine humming like a wasp in a jam jar. He says the needle does not know the difference between love and hate, it only knows the line. You say that sounds like a poor excuse. He laughs, turns his hands over, and shows you the brass knuckles in the drawing. They were his father's, he says, the only thing the old man left behind that didn't end up in a pub.

By November the dragon is finished, a tangle of blue ink on the back of the wardrobe door, and he is leaving for a studio in Leeds. He asks you to choose which word goes at the top of the scroll. You stand in the doorway with the cold tea going soft in your hands and say nothing, which he takes for an answer.

When you strip the room in spring you find the drawing folded small in the drawer. Hate has been struck through with one clean stroke, and Love stands alone against the flames, bright as a gull's wing.