Black line drawing flash sheet of a geometric style design, with two facing stylised birds at the top, a horizontal band of X-shaped motifs in the middle and a stepped chevron below.

Geometric flash sheet with birds, band and chevron

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three separate geometric designs drawn in black outline on cream paper. The top design is two stylised birds or fish facing each other, built from fan-shaped segments, diamond-patterned bodies and solid black wedges. The middle is a horizontal band of three boxed X-shaped motifs joined by parallel bars, and the bottom is a stepped, nested chevron with a vertical stem.

Geometric Bird Fish Geometric pattern Band Chevron Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, and mind the coal dust on that chair, it has never once come out. Your great-grandfather kept two canaries on the shelf above the pit gate, a cock and a hen, and they sang the whole shift through, so the men knew the air was good. When the singing stopped, the men walked out, quick as they could, and nobody argued with a bird.

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The pair of them were never kept apart. Every morning the hen would flutter down to the cage door and the cock would sidle along the perch to meet her, and they would sit side by side, wing to wing, like two hands folded in chapel. The overman laughed at them and called them daft, but he was the first to ask after them when the cold came in off the moor.

One November the cock went quiet on the Monday and the hen went quiet on the Tuesday, and the lamp men carried the cage up the wooden stairs wrapped in a sack of straw. Nobody knew what killed them. Your great-grandfather swore the gas had been creeping through the low drift for a week before anyone smelt it, and that the birds had only been keeping faith with the rest of the village.

He buried them under the stepped stone by the chapel wall, the one with the notched edge that looks like a stair going down. Every shift after, he tipped his cap at it. You can still see the place if you go up on a clear day, where the grass grows in two green wings.