Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Kanji and animal tattoo flash sheet
Japanese · Mixed · Flash
A grid of thirty flash designs arranged in six rows of five, each pairing a kanji character with a small illustration or an English label. The subjects include animals such as a crane, parrot, dragon, shark, panther, cat, dog, horse, wolf, fox, tiger, unicorn, deer, carp, crow, turtle, frog and fish, alongside a rose, orchid, butterfly, fire, cloud, moon and sun. The linework is bold and outlined, with some designs in full colour and others in black and grey, set on a plain white background.
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
By the second week of October you could recite the sheet with your eyes shut: crane, luck, parrot, dragon, shark across the top, then orchid and panther below, down to truth in its black capitals in the corner. Ada had pinned it above the mirror in the back room of the parlour on Quay Street, beside the calendar from the fish merchant, and it had been yellowing there since before you were born. Each time the bell over the door rang you looked up at it first, as if one of the animals might have wandered off the paper.
Keep reading
The sailor who came in on the Thursday said his name was Dennis Vail and said it like a warning. He had a ferry ticket in one fist and a crumpled note in the other. He wanted peace, and he pointed at the character in the middle of the sheet, the one with a stalk of grain standing over a little box, and said he needed it on his forearm before the tide turned at six. Ada was out at the chandler's. So you loaded the stylus and drew it the way she had taught you, slow, the top stroke first.
Halfway through the second stroke your hand stopped. The lower half of the character sat a fraction too far left on the sheet, and you had copied it that way all week in the margins of your schoolbook, so you had been learning it wrong. Dennis watched you falter. 'Can't you just get on with it?' he said. 'I can,' you said, and you wiped the skin and began again, correctly this time, though the lines came out thick and uneven under your fingers.
When he left he was pleased and a little embarrassed, and he pressed a shilling on you for the nerves. That evening you took the sheet down, turned it over, and copied the whole grid onto the back in pencil, character by character, the crane's neck bent the way it should be. Then you pinned it back above the mirror, where the red sun character caught the last of the light from the window.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.