Black and grey flash sheet of tattoo designs including a pipe, key, skull cameo, feather, tobacco tin, compass, pocket knife, matchbox and honeycomb, set on a dotted background.

Flash sheet of pipe, key, skull and feather

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey flash sheet arranged in a loose grid on a speckled dot background. The designs include a smoking pipe, an ornate key, a skull in a circular frame, a large feather, a tobacco tin labelled Fine Gold Flake Cut, a pair of dividers, a pocket knife, a matchbox and a honeycomb, with crystals and a small leaf among them. The linework is bold with hatching and stippled shading, and the designs are spaced evenly across the sheet.

Dotwork Pipe Key Skull Feather Compass Leaf Honeycomb Crystal Tusk Medallion

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat. You want the story of the box, not the pit, and I'll give you the box, because the pit's had enough of our talk. Tom Pardoe kept a tin box under the bed in the back room at Hollin Row, and when the roof came in at the Low Seam in the spring of forty-one, they carried him out and nobody thought to carry out the box. My sister went up for it with a lamp and came back down white as lime.

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Inside was everything a man keeps when he has no wife to keep it for him. A brass key that opened nothing in the house, and we tried every door. A clay pipe with his teeth marks worn into the stem. An empty tin of Gold Flake, which he used for sixpences. Eye Brand matches with nine left in the box. A pair of dividers the surveyor lent him, that he used to walk the workings on paper every night after his shift. A little wax comb of honey gone to sugar, and a crystal the size of a thumb that caught the lamp and threw it back at us as if it were angry.

Here is the thing I never told anyone. The dividers were set at the exact width of the Low Seam, and he'd pinned a jackdaw feather to the far point. He knew where the roof would go. He had measured it, and he had kept quiet, because the owners would have sent him down anyway.

So I struck one of those nine matches, sat at his table, and let it burn down to my fingers before I put it out, which is the only grief I've ever been able to manage.