Collage of four coloured drawings of tattoo designs on paper: a bow in a pearl-edged heart, an eye in a pearl-edged triangle, a rose with leaves, and a diamond-patterned heart pierced by an arrow, all

Four tattoo flash designs on paper

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

The collage shows four hand-drawn tattoo designs on paper, each with dark outlines. The designs include a blue bow in a pearl-edged heart, an eye inside a triangle with a flowing hair detail, a pink rose with sprigs and small stars, and a red diamond-patterned heart with an arrow. Each design has dotted chains hanging beneath it, and the colour is applied as soft shading and fills.

Dotwork Botanical Heart Bow Eye Rose Arrow Diamond Pearl Chain Star Leaves

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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 officer at Hollin Ford would not stamp the cart until he had seen every sheet, so Marta laid them out one by one on the wet tailgate while rain ran off the brim of his cap.

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The first was a heart with a blue bow tied across its middle, pearls ringing the edge like a bead curtain. The second was a single eye set inside a triangle, its lashes drawn so finely he leaned in to check they were not real. The third was a pink rose with sprigs of leaf and four small stars, and the fourth a heart cut into diamond facets with an arrow driven through it. Each one dripped its little chain of dots towards the foot of the page.

What are they for, he asked. Marta said they were for skin, and that skin would carry them further than any cart could. He did not like that answer and said so. She told him the chains were the road: every dot was a step already walked by someone who had paid for the ink. He counted the dots on the rose with his thumb, moving down the paper, until the count matched the number of days from the river to the sea road.

He stamped the cart and kept the rose. She watched him slide it into the drawer under the lamp, face down, its stars pricked through the paper, so that when the drawer closed the sheet still held the small holes against the lamp light.