Black and white flash sheet showing six drawn forearms and hands, each with a different traditional and blackwork tattoo design including a mandala, rose, dagger and horseshoe.

Six forearm and hand flash designs on drawn arms

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white flash sheet with six stacked drawings of forearms and hands, each covered in tattoo designs. The designs include mandalas, roses, daggers, a horseshoe with a cross, a hamsa, feathers, hearts and small geometric marks. The linework is bold and the shading uses solid black fills, stippling and fine hatching, with the designs arranged densely across each arm.

Traditional Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Hand Mandala Rose Dagger Horseshoe Cross Hamsa Feather Heart Wing Arrow Sun 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

Margit had the night porter's keys and no patience for anyone who came up from the cellar carrying other people's trouble. After the ten o'clock round the fourth floor went quiet, and the old men slept with their mouths open while the machines counted their breaths for them. In her locker she kept a tin of charms she had carried from the coast, each one a card stamped with a mark her grandmother had taught her to trust: a horseshoe bent over a cross, a dagger with its point to the floor, a hand with a sun in its palm.

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The trouble came on a Tuesday in February, when the lift brought up a boy with a cut that would not close and a mother who would not sit down. The monitor by his bed kept drawing the same jagged line, and the registrar kept saying it was nothing to worry about, which in Margit's experience meant it was everything. She took the tin out of her coat and laid the cards along the windowsill like a hand of patience. The horseshoe went on the door. The hamsa went by the window. A sun went on the drip stand, because her grandmother said the sun had never once forgotten a sickroom. Last of all she set the dagger at the foot of the bed, point down, for whatever had come in on the lift.

By four o'clock the line began to level. The boy's breathing lengthened until it matched the hum of the fans. The mother finally sat, and when Margit came back with two cups of tea she found the cards gathered into a neat pile on the bedside table. The mother had written on the back of each one in careful pencil, slowly, as if she had had to learn her letters again that night.

Margit took the tin back to her locker and put the dagger in last. The others she left with the mother, who had already started pinning the horseshoe above the bed. That is how the old women on the coast said these things were done, and nobody on the fourth floor has ever told Margit she was wrong.