Black line drawing flash sheet of Latvian folk symbols, including sun signs, crosses, a morning star, a firecross and tree motifs, each labelled in Latvian and English.

Latvian folk sign flash sheet with labelled symbols

Black and grey · Flash

This flash sheet shows a grid of black line-drawn Latvian folk symbols arranged in rows on a pale grey background. The designs include circular sun signs, crosses, star and cross motifs, zigzag bands, whisk-like shapes, a firecross labelled as a swastika, and stylised tree forms, with each group captioned in small capitals. The linework is uniform and bold, with no shading, and the composition is organised into labelled blocks.

Cross Zigzag Tree Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways off the river by nine, and by ten the wooden stalls at the back of the market were dripping like wet dogs. Ilze had given up trying to keep the honey jars dry and sat on an upturned crate, turning the pages of her grandmother's notebook. The pencil drawings were smudged with thumbprints, each sign copied out by hand with a note in the margin about where it should be cut, a door lintel or the side of a churn.

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Old Jānis from the cheese stall shuffled over with two cups of tea that tasted of tin. He looked at the page over her shoulder and tapped a wheel of spokes and petals. "Your grandmother drew that one wrong," he said. "Too many petals. The sun does not need to show off." He took the pencil from behind her ear, corrected the drawing, then pushed back his sleeve and marked the same wheel on the inside of his wrist, pressing so hard the paper underneath tore.

"Who is it for?" she asked. "The hens," he said. "There is a grass-snake living under my woodpile at the dacha, and it has been eating the eggs since spring. Your grandmother told me a sun sign keeps the snake honest, or at least keeps it out of the henhouse. I never believed her." He shrugged. "She was right about most things, which was annoying."

Ilze laughed, then stopped, because the rain had thinned to nothing and a single shaft of light lay across the cobbles, catching the puddles. Between the stalls the water had begun to run in slow rings around a dropped wooden spoon, and the handle of the spoon pointed straight at the old man's wrist. She tore the page from the notebook, folded it into her coat, and walked with him toward the gate, where the stones were already drying in the shape of spokes.