Black ink flash sheet of traditional-style designs including skulls, a cat, a rose, a dagger, an owl and a rabbit, many marked with the number 13, shown as drawings with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand-drawn flash sheet with 13 motifs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn flash sheet in black ink on white paper, showing around forty small designs arranged in a loose grid. Motifs include skulls, animals, a rose, a dagger, dice, a tombstone, a playing card and a horseshoe, many featuring the number 13. The linework is bold and even with simple hatching and no colour, and handwritten labels such as unlucky and brave appear beside a few designs.

Traditional Skull Cat Rose Dagger Owl Rabbit Dice Tombstone Playing card Horseshoe Eye Hamsa Crow Candle Heart Pipe Umbrella Bat Ship

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat had thirteen names scratched into her transom before anyone thought to count them, and Mary Pascoe would not let the Constance leave the slip until each one was scraped off with a hot iron. Her husband Jory laughed at her from the gunwale. He was still laughing when the tide turned, and he was still laughing, she said afterwards, when the gulls gathered on the breakwater like black buttons sewn in a row.

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Jory carried a pair of bone dice in his waistcoat and rolled them on the cabin table for ale money. Mary hated the clatter. One night she tipped them into the bilge, and he fished them out dripping, saying the sea was a poor gambler and would not take what was his. He lost them to a Penzance man the following spring, along with the grey cat that sat on the cottage step and would never walk across the thirteenth board of the floor.

The winter the Constance went down, the fleet came home with twelve men in seven boats and no sign of the thirteenth. Mary took the old tin lantern from the shed, tied a crow's feather to its handle, and lit it at the harbour mouth every dusk for a year. Nobody asked her why she kept counting the drowned. She said it was the only sum she trusted.

On the anniversary, a boy from the far end of the quay rowed out with a bottle sealed in oilcloth. Inside was a scrap of paper in Jory's cramped hand, asking for his dice back. Mary read it twice, laughed for the first time since spring, and set the lantern on the sill with thirteen matches laid beside it.