A grid of colourful neo-traditional tattoo designs featuring Pokémon characters with roses, anchors, lightning bolts and banners.

Neo-traditional Pokémon flash sheet

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A grid of around twenty-seven neo-traditional flash designs, each drawn as a self-contained vignette of a Pokémon character. The subjects include a Pikachu with roses, a Charmander, a Bulbasaur, a Squirtle in an anchor frame, and several other creatures set against ornate frames, banners and florals. The designs use bold black outlines, heavy shading and saturated colour on pale cream or patterned backgrounds.

Neo-trad Pokemon Rose Anchor Lightning bolt Banner 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

The lift in Kestrel House had been broken since March, so we took the stairs to the fourteenth floor with the shopping cutting into our fingers. Grandad Ray had drawn his pictures on the backs of council leaflets, and the stack sat in a carrier bag at the top, held together with a bulldog clip. Every sheet was a little badge of a creature in a frame: a yellow mouse with a lightning-bolt tail, a lizard with a flame lit at the end of its tail, and a turtle riding inside an anchor as though it had sailed there on purpose.

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Mrs Oduya from six had asked for a copy for her son's birthday, and Grandad had promised to do them properly, with the thick black lines he used on the sign for the chippy. He never finished. His chest was bad by then and the pen kept skipping on the paper. When I opened the clip on the landing, I found the turtle's anchor sketched in pencil, the rope curling round it, but the water inside the frame was still blank.

I sat on the step with the sheet on my knees while the bulb buzzed above me. Somewhere below, someone was playing the same three notes on a trumpet, over and over, and I couldn't tell if they were practising or just stuck. I had his black fineliner in my coat pocket because I had nicked it from the kitchen drawer the week before, meaning to give it back. I shaded the water with short hard strokes, the way he had shown me on the leaflets, until the turtle looked like it had somewhere to be.

Mrs Oduya's son got his copy on Saturday. He asked who had drawn the turtle. I said my grandad, which was true, and I didn't say the water was mine.