Sheet of dragon flash designs in black and grey, including a large central Chinese-style dragon with swirling tribal detailing, shown without a body placement.

Dragon flash sheet in black and grey

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of dragon designs drawn in black linework, solid black silhouettes and grey tones on a beige background. A large central dragon with curling whiskers, clawed feet and scale patterning is surrounded by smaller dragons in varied poses, and a strip of tribal-style dragon bands runs along the bottom. The layout is dense and evenly spaced, typical of a stencil or flash reference sheet.

Traditional Blackwork Dragon Flash sheet Tribal Scale Whiskers

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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 stencil sheets came up from Foshan in a tube wrapped in newspaper, forty-one dragons on one page, and Mei Lin spent the whole of a wet Tuesday cutting them apart with her grandfather's scalpel. She kept the big one in the middle for herself. Its whiskers curled like smoke off a struck match, and its claws were hooked round nothing, as if it had just missed a lantern and was thinking about it.

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The shop on Leeds Road had a bell that rang when the door opened and a radio that never quite found the football. Customers came in asking for something fierce and went out with a small dragon curled round the ankle, because Mei Lin always said the big ones were for people who had already decided who they were. She pinned the flash to the wall in the order she had cut it, so the dragons faced each other across the room like a row of neighbours who had not yet spoken.

In March a boy came in with his mother's bus pass and four pounds in coins, asking for the dragon with the scales. She told him it would cost more than that. He sat on the stool anyway and watched her trace the spine with a grey marker, scale by scale, until the outline looked like it was moving under the paper.

She did not charge him. She gave him the stencil, the cut one, and told him to keep it flat in a book so the pattern would not curl. He took it home. The next week the wall had one gap in it, exactly the size of the big dragon, and nobody could say when it had been taken down.