Grid of sixteen flash designs including an anchor, bird silhouette, clefs, bow, diamond, hearts, flowers, a dinosaur and butterflies, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flash sheet of sixteen small motifs

Mixed · Flash

A four by four grid of separate flash designs on a pale grey background. The motifs include an anchor, a bird silhouette, treble and bass clefs, a bow, a diamond, two hearts, orchid and blossom sprigs, a lotus, a chrysanthemum, a stylised sprig, a dinosaur and two butterflies. Some designs are solid black silhouettes or outlines, while others use flat red, pink, orange, green and blue fills with simple dark outlines.

Anchor Bird Treble clef Bass clef Bow Diamond Heart Orchid Blossom Branch Lotus Chrysanthemum Sprig Dinosaur Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin came across the counter at half past eleven, wedged between a cracked metronome and a bag of guitar strings nobody had claimed. Ines pulled the lid off with her thumbnail and found a folded sheet of card, sixteen small designs pinned to it in a grid, the paper gone soft as cloth at the corners. Someone had written tiny numbers beside each one in biro. Under the green dinosaur, in capitals, somebody had written NOT YET.

Keep reading

Mr Okafor, who had owned the shop and had been dead a week, had never been a man for paperwork. The room smelt of hot dust and machine oil. Outside, the buses hissed along the wet road and the streetlamp buzzed like a fly against glass. Ines turned the card over. On the back was a list in three different hands. Anchor, 1971, Dock Road. Bird, 1974, a girl called Sunny who wanted it finished before her wedding. Treble and bass, the same year, two brothers who never spoke again after the sitting. Hearts, two, one for each of two sisters who had come in separately and asked for the same thing. She stopped reading there, because her throat had gone tight, and none of it was her business.

The lotus, the chrysanthemum, the blossom sprigs and the pair of monarchs each had a name and a year. The orchid had a question mark. The diamond said only, for Mum, when she's out. The dinosaur had nothing but its capitals.

She took a pencil from the jar by the till, found the date on the calendar, and wrote in the smallest hand she had underneath the grinning lizard: Ines, this year. Then she pinned the card back into the tin, set it on the shelf beside the metronome where the lamp could reach it, and went to lock up.