Flash sheet of six cartoon tattoo designs in a bold neo-traditional style, each with a slogan banner, including a lemon, a game console and a flame figure.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six cartoon character tattoo designs on banners

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A flash sheet of six separate cartoon character designs, each set on a small banner with a slogan: "For Science", "Check Please", "Unacceptable", "Hot to the Touch", "Kick Butt" and "Bad Little Boy". The figures include a pink-haired character in goggles holding flasks, a boxy handheld console with music notes, a lemon with a scowl, a flame-haired figure with candles, a character in a bunny hood with a sword, and a pale vampire-like figure with a skull. The linework is thick and dark, with flat, bright colour fills and simple shading, arranged on a plain white background.

Neo-trad Cartoon character Flame Flower Sword Skull Goggles Banner Slogan Bat Candle Music note

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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 sketchbook is the fourth thing you pull from the lorry's cab, after the flask of cold tea and before the box of wet socks. You flick past the pages with the thumb you usually save for passports. Pink hair under a pair of goggles. A grey box with a smiling face and a little handle. A lemon scowling over a crumpled paper. Six small banners, each with its slogan in capitals, and you read them the way you read anything on a manifest: For Science. Check Please. Unacceptable.

Keep reading

The driver, a man called Dessie Moran from Carlow, leans on the open door and says they're flash designs for a tattoo day in Leeds. Not for sale. Not for export. He's been drawing them since his daughter lent him her colouring pencils in 2009. You ask what the bat is doing on the skull and he says that one's a bad little boy, and he would like it noted that the boy is a vampire and not a real person. You say you'll note it. You do not write down that the lemon has been looking at you for a full minute, because lemons can't look at anyone, and you have been on the night shift for eleven hours.

You hold the sheet up to the lamp so the fills glow like sweets. The flame-haired figure on the last page has a candle in each hand and an expression that suggests she has already won the argument. You stamp the sheet with the blue round stamp, the one that means nothing is being smuggled but feelings. The mark lands square across the lemon's forehead.

He takes the sketchbook back with both hands, careful as a man carrying a cake. Behind him the ferry's horn sounds twice, and somewhere on the lorry's trailer a box of cheap ink shifts and settles. You wave him through. He leaves the lemon looking exactly as unimpressed as it did before the stamp, which is, you think, the most honest thing you've seen all week.