Flash design of a pistol with a spade cutout at the top, with vines, pink flowers, feathers and a dandelion trailing down beneath it.

Pistol with trailing flowers and vines

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a pistol at the top, its slide decorated with a spade cutout, with a twisting vine hanging from it. Pink cherry blossom, roses and a lily hang from the vine alongside grey feathers, a dandelion and small falling petals. The pistol is shaded in greys with fine linework, while the flowers are filled with soft pink and yellow watercolour-style colour on a white background.

Botanical Pistol Gun Spade Vine Flower Rose Cherry blossom Lily Feather Dandelion Petal

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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

Right, sit closer, the fire's dying and I'll not shout over it. You want to know why the sharpshooter stopped firing at the Palace of Marvels? I'll tell you, though you'll think less of the tale than of the teller.

Keep reading

Nell Tarrant could split a playing card edge-on at twenty paces. Her father had the pistol made in Birmingham, polished grey and fine as a clock, with a spade cut out of the slide so the light came through it. Every night she shot the petals off the paper roses the wardrobe mistress sewed, and the crowd gasped as if it were blood. Money was thin that winter. The canvas was patched with feed sacks, the elephant had gone to a farm in Wales, and the ringmaster took his supper from a flask.

Then the thing happened that the old hands still argue over. A dandelion clock drifted in under the flap one still evening, and she caught it on the barrel instead of firing. The seeds lifted off into the lamplight like a held breath let go. Nobody clapped. Nell lowered the pistol, the lily girl started to cry, and that was the end of the shooting act and the start of the flower act, which filled the ring with petals and kept the wolves from the door a good while longer.

Mind, the gun's still in a drawer in Ashby. Nell never fired it again. She said a thing that can shoot seeds into the wind on its own has no need of bullets, and a thing that fires bullets only ever digs graves. Now hush, child, and mind the cinders.