Black and white flash sheet of lightning bolt designs, including script and block lettering labels, outlined and solid bolts, and two thunderbolts with clouds.

Lightning bolt and thunderbolt flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet arranged in rows, showing many lightning bolt designs in solid black, outlined and jagged cracked forms, with some labelled 'Lightning' and 'thunderbolt' in script or block lettering. Two designs pair a bolt with a cartoon cloud, and the rest are single bolts of varying angle and thickness. The sheet is entirely black ink on white, with clean, bold linework and no shading.

Lightning Lightning bolt Cloud Lettering Flash sheet

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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

Mr Pruett had a sign-writing shop above the chip shop on Gull Parade, and the only thing he ever drew without being paid was lightning. He kept a flash sheet pinned behind the counter, four bolts to a row, each one lettered underneath in his looping hand, because he said a bolt with no name was only a crack in the plaster. I was fourteen when he set me to copying them onto board for the pier railings, and I got the clouds wrong for a fortnight because the puffs kept coming out like cabbages.

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The summer the regatta flooded, the whole front was papered with our signs. Every hoarding had a black bolt stabbing down out of a cloud, and the council wanted them all taken down before the gales came in. Mr Pruett sent me out at dusk with a pot of size and a brush. I went along the rail painting the thunderbolts thick and solid, all except the last one, which I did as an outline, hollow inside, because I liked the idea of something you could see the sea through.

The storm came in off the Sound before midnight and found the railings the way storms always find the tallest iron. In the morning the solid signs were streaked and blistered, and the hollow one at the end had gone altogether, leaving only a scorched mark on the rail and the word thunderbolt, still legible, curling in its own black.

Mr Pruett walked the length of the pier with his hands in his coat. He stopped by the scorch, looked at it for a long while, then handed me a fresh sheet and a full pot of black without a word, which from him was the kindest thing he ever said.