Black ink line sketch of a man with a quiff and a lightning bolt across his face, with lyrics in handwritten lettering and radiating lines, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Line drawing of a lightning bolt face with lyric

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A fine black line drawing on paper shows a man's head and shoulders with swept-back hair and a lightning bolt across one eye. Handwritten lyrics sit beside the face, and radiating lines and a small triangle surround the figure. The linework is thin and sketchy with no shading, and the composition is a simple portrait with text.

Fine line Portrait Lightning bolt Lyric Lettering Radiating lines Triangle Face

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

I had the radio off at four because Dolores hated it before the first tray went in, so when the speaker on the shelf above the proving drawer crackled into life I assumed the old wiring had finally given up. It was a cassette I'd tossed in that drawer years ago with the label half peeled off. The tape had wound itself back to the start, and a thin guitar came out of the speaker, then a voice I knew better than my cousins'. I stood there with flour to my elbows and a tray of bloomers hot against my hip.

Keep reading

The shop had been my father's until his knees gave out. He kept that tape for reasons he never explained, and he used to play it when the dough was sluggish, insisting a loaf rises better when someone is singing at it. I had sworn I would never touch it. Then the song reached the chorus, the bit that asks whether there is one damn song that can make a person break down and cry, and I had to set the tray down because my hands were shaking and I'd have burnt my wrists on the oven door.

What undid me wasn't the music. It was the sleeve, which I had found in the drawer with him still in it. On the inside flap he'd drawn himself in biro, a crude lightning bolt struck clean across one eye, hair swept up like a wave breaking. Underneath he'd written: bread doesn't care who you are, so keep it warm. I laughed at that, then I didn't.

By the time the window went grey I had sold two dozen loaves, and I had cried into the flour more than once. The tape was still going when the first customer knocked, patient as dough, and I let it run.