Black linework flash sheet of Irish-themed tattoo designs, including a shamrock, harp, pipe, horseshoe, pot of gold and banner lettering, shown on a flat, unmarked white sheet.

Irish-themed traditional flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A white sheet of black-outlined tattoo flash drawings with Irish and St Patrick's Day themes, arranged in a loose grid. Designs include a harp, a clay pipe, a tankard, a top hat, a pot of gold, horseshoes, clovers, a Celtic knot and a heart with a banner. Lettering such as 'Erin go bragh', 'Kiss me I'm Irish' and 'New York' sits among the motifs, and the sheet is photographed on a wooden surface.

Traditional Lettering Shamrock Celtic knot Pipe Top hat Horseshoe Heart Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry is late again, so you spend the afternoon at Mulcahy's with a stub of pencil and the back of a feed sheet, drawing things nobody on Inishcarrig has asked for. A harp first, because the harp always comes first. Then a clover with four leaves, one of them wonky the way your mother's always were. Mick behind the bar keeps topping up your pint and pretending not to watch.

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By six you have a whole page of them: a tankard with its foam drawn in little curls, a top hat with a buckle the size of a biscuit, a pot with lucky scrawled across it so the gold has somewhere to go. Mick reads the banner you've lettered along the bottom, Kiss me I'm Irish, and laughs so hard he has to sit down on a crate. 'Nobody on this rock has ever been asked to kiss anyone,' he says. 'Put a horseshoe on it and they'll think it's a dare.'

The sheet goes up on the wall beside the dartboard, held by four drawing pins that rust by Easter. Summer visitors photograph it. A girl from Galway asks whether the pipe is for smoking or for show, and you tell her it depends who's holding it. You never see her again, but a week later her brother rings the bar wanting the clover with the crown of thorns, and you know exactly which leaf he means.

Years on, the paper is soft as cloth and browned at the corners. Mick is gone, the bar is a holiday let, and the drawings are still up there when you visit, the ink faded to the colour of weak tea. You count the horseshoes out of habit. Eleven. You were always a bad counter, and luck, it turns out, is just whatever you keep drawing until somebody needs it.