Black ink flash drawings on tracing paper showing a pirate captain with a clock, a horned villainess, a raven and a figure with a skull, with no tattoo placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pirate, horned figure and raven flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing sheet on tracing paper showing several cartoon characters: a pirate captain beside a clock, a horned female figure, a raven, and a figure with a skull-like face in a decorative frame. The linework is bold and uniform, with some solid black ink shapes and no shading or grey tones. No colour is used, and the sheet is photographed on a light surface with a few paper edges visible.

Pirate Clock Raven Skull Cartoon character Ink splash 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 sheets came out of the courier's case at Dover, eleven of them, rolled in greaseproof paper. Mrs Okonedo at the next desk held one up to the strip light and said the captain looked like he'd been drawn by someone who had only heard about pirates on the radio. I told her to log them as artwork, not contraband, and to stop laughing.

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The one that held me was the horned woman with the raven on her shoulder, ink pooling beneath her like spilt tar. Someone had gone over every line with the same nib, bold and even, with no shading anywhere, so the whole thing looked cut from black paper. Behind her a clock face had its hands stopped at a quarter to something. The courier, a boy named Teodor with a sunburnt neck, said the clock was the only thing his uncle insisted on keeping exact.

The skull-faced figure in the corner frame was the one that stopped me. Through the tracing paper, the eyes looked back the way the men at the bus station look when they know the time and won't say it. I asked Teodor who the sheets were for. He said a man in Ramsgate who collected flash and paid in cash, and who had asked for them to be sent back without being unrolled twice.

I stamped the form and let them through. Before he left, Teodor tapped the corner of the pirate's hat and said the hands on that clock never moved until someone agreed to the price. I watched his van pull out past the barrier, and the sheets rattled faintly in the back seat, like something impatient to be counted.