Hand-drawn sheet on squared paper showing many small line symbols, including an ankh, eye, skull, owl, lion, dreamcatcher and mountains, as possible tattoo designs.

Hand-drawn sheet of small tattoo symbols

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink sheet on squared graph paper with dozens of small, simple symbols arranged in a loose grid. The symbols include an ankh, an eye, a skull, an owl, a lion head, a dreamcatcher, a guitar, a pineapple, mountains, a cactus, a key and a dragonfly, all drawn in fine black outline. The drawing is monochrome and evenly spaced, so each design can be read separately.

Ankh Eye Skull Owl Lion Dreamcatcher Guitar Pineapple Mountain Cactus Key Dragonfly Heart Feather Turtle Wave Sun Candle Star Arrow

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the guard has gone off to smoke and we have until his cigarette is finished. You want to hear how my cousin Dimitri got a sack of grey feathers across the river at Lipnik? Then you must learn the signs first, because the men on that bridge cannot read a word of anything, but they can read a picture. Look at the sheet. The owl is for night, when the lamps go out and nobody counts. The key means a door will open if you knock twice. The mountains mean keep walking uphill, and the wave means the river will be lower than it looks.

Keep reading

Dimitri drew all of them on squared paper with a pencil he kept behind his ear, each one small enough to sit on the back of a hand, because a man can be searched but a hand is harder to search. He had the heart for his sister, the candle for the widow who would hide him, and a dragonfly for luck, which he said was foolish and kept anyway. He showed the sheet to the guard that morning, a boy younger than the feathers, and tapped the little flag in the corner.

The boy frowned at the flag. It was the flag of the town where his grandmother was born, a town the maps had forgotten. He looked at the cactus, which made no sense in that country, then at the dreamcatcher, and he laughed quietly and asked who had taught Dimitri to draw. Dimitri said nobody, the drawings had taught him. The boy turned the page back to the owl, looked up at the dark sky, and waved them through without opening the sack.

That is the whole secret, my friend. Every sign is a small promise somebody made once and nobody bothered to take back. Now give me your hand, and I will draw you a key, because you look like someone who will need to get in somewhere.