Traditional flash sheet with the words NO MONEY NO TATTOO, a swallow, a lighthouse, falling coins, a clasped handshake on a striped sleeve, an anchor and shears in the corners.

No money no tattoo flash sheet

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A traditional-style flash sheet with bold blackletter-style lettering reading NO MONEY NO TATTOO above GOOD MONEY GOOD TATTOOS. Below the text are a swallow in flight, a striped lighthouse, falling gold coins and a handshake on a striped sleeve, with an anchor at the top and shears in the corners. Bold black outlines are filled with red, blue, yellow and green on a warm yellow background.

Traditional Lettering Lettering Swallow Lighthouse Coin Anchor Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had a sign over her door that said exactly what it meant, and she never once let me forget it. Three weeks I'd been climbing the steps from the harbour with my pockets full of promises. On the Thursday I laid the coins on her counter one at a time, the last of the Merrow's wages, still warm from my hand. She didn't count them. She pushed them back an inch and said the sign was not a joke.

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So I went back to sea. The Merrow ran coal across to the Irish side and back, past the light at Skerry Point, where the keeper's wife hung a lamp in the window every night her husband was out on the boats. A swallow came aboard off the Blackwater in February, worn out, and sat on the rail for an entire watch. I fed it crumbs from my tin and told it what Ada was going to do with my money. It seemed to approve.

The gale caught us off the point in March. We lost the foresail and two days of our course, and when the mate, Dunn, saw my face at the wheel, he pressed his share into my palm without a word and shut my fingers over it. Good money, he said, like a man who had never once been skint. We made harbour on the third morning with the lamp still burning at Skerry Point, red and white stripes against the grey.

Ada took the coins without counting them that time either. She looked up at me, then at the empty spot on the rail where the swallow had been, and reached for her shears. 'Hold still,' she said, and the needle started, and the sea I'd nearly drowned in went quiet.