Six neo-traditional tattoo flash designs on paper showing a ram skull, a deer skull, a moth, a fennec fox, a red panda and a bird with peonies, all in bright colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Neo-traditional animal designs on flash sheets

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

Six separate flash designs are laid out on a dark surface: a ram skull with curled horns, a deer skull with antlers, a winged moth, a fennec fox, a red panda and a bird with peonies. Each piece has bold outlines, layered petals and foliage, and ornate heart or circular frames. The inks are bright and saturated, with pink, orange, teal and gold shading against white paper.

Neo-trad Ram Skull Deer Moth Fox Bird Peony Flower Heart Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been told the ram was too stern for a wedding, so she gave it a sprig of peony to chew on and sent it out with the others. Nobody came for the ram. They came for the fox, with its ears like two open letters, and for the red panda sitting in its heart-shaped frame as if it had been waiting all afternoon for a bus.

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Ada painted in the back room above the chip shop on Mill Row, where the radiator knocked in threes. Her brother Tom ran the front counter and read the orders out loud, sounding each animal's name like a cricket score. Fennec. Red panda. Deer, which is not a skull, Ada, it's a skull with opinions. She told him to hush and went on layering petals, pink over orange over gold, until the paper stopped looking flat.

The moth was the last of the six and the only one she did not sketch first. It came out of the water pot one wet evening, she always said, though Tom swore she had copied it from a book of moths in the library. She pinned it to the wall with the others. By Friday a woman with grey plaits had bought the bird and the peonies, and the moth had gone to a man who said he wanted it on his shoulder where he could feel it breathe.

Ada kept only the red panda. Every night she turned it to the lamp and told it the rest had gone well, and every night it looked back at her, pleased, the way animals do when they have been fed.