Black and grey flash sheet of more than fifty small icon designs, including a dagger, anchor, eye, skull, heart and paper plane, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grid of small tattoo flash designs

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of more than fifty small, simple line icons arranged in a regular grid on a plain white background. The designs include a cross, anchor, diamond, dagger, lightning bolt, eye, arrow, crescent moon, skull, hot air balloon, paper plane and piano keys. All are drawn in uniform black outline with no shading, and the even spacing presents them as individual flash options.

Cross Mickey mouse Anchor Diamond Dagger Rose Lightning bolt Eye Arrow Compass Peace sign Ship Moon Umbrella Cherry Music note Ice cream Skull

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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 ones at the back, and stop pretending you can't hear me over the crisps. You all remember Mrs Pardoe's chemistry room, the one with the broken extractor fan and the wall of laminated posters? Behind the poster on the far wall, held up by a drawing pin that had lost its colour, there was a sheet of paper nobody was supposed to see. Fifty-odd little icons in black biro: a cross, an anchor, a paper plane, a sad little balloon. Ronnie Vaisey swore it was a spell list.

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Ronnie wanted to be a sailor, so the anchor was his. Jenny Hollis said the dagger and the broken heart were hers to borrow for a year, because she'd decided she was going to be dramatic. Nobody remembers who drew the piano keys, but it was Mr Ashdown, I'm certain of it, because he hummed the same four notes all afternoon while we pretended to wash beakers.

The rule was simple. Whoever reached the sheet first each Friday picked one picture and had to draw it somewhere that would last: a bit of cardboard, the back of a hand, the inside of a locker door. Ronnie inked the anchor on his wrist with a biro, and it lasted three weeks. Then his mum scrubbed it off at the kitchen sink and he cried over the bubbles.

So where is the sheet now? Ask Jenny, who kept the last square, the little paper plane, folded into her purse for thirty years. She says it still flies if you think about it hard enough. Go on, then, somebody throw it across the hall and see where it lands.