Six vertical illustrated flash designs in a neo-traditional style, each showing a Disney-inspired princess or fairy character framed by roses, ribbons and banners.

Six princess flash designs with banners

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The image is a tall stack of six separate illustrated designs, each with a female character in a bust or half-length pose. Bold outlines, smooth colour fills and soft highlights are used throughout, with banners, roses, lotus flowers and small birds framing the figures on aged parchment-style backgrounds. The palette is full colour, with reds, blues, greens and golds dominating.

Neo-trad Traditional Mermaid Princess Fairy Rose Banner Ribbon Lotus Bird Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The folder lived under the sink in our flat on the fourteenth floor, between the bleach and the bin bags, and I was eleven before I understood that it held drawings and not bills. Cousin Dara had been a tattooist on the parade until his hands went, and he left Mum six sheets of old flash, each a painted girl in a little oval frame with a ribbon across the bottom. Sea Glass. Lantern Girl. Thorn Queen. The parchment had gone the colour of weak tea.

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On the night the lift broke again, I sat on the kitchen lino with the sheets fanned out and the power off, reading the banners by torchlight. Mum came in from her shift still in her laundry overall, smelling of hot starch, and she didn't tell me to put them away. She pulled a chair over and tapped the one with the mermaid. "Dara drew her for a girl who wanted to leave the estate," she said. "Not the sea. Just the estate." I asked whether she'd gone. "She got married and stayed on the sixth floor. But she had the tail done on her ankle anyway, so she could say she'd gone."

The last sheet had a lotus at the bottom and a ribbon that read Last Lotus Kept. The girl in it had a face I half knew from the lift mirror, though I'd never admit that. Mum traced the lettering with one fingernail. "Dara said people always asked for the lotus on their hips," she said. "He said it was the one that meant you'd come back up after going under."

The lift hummed back to life somewhere below us, and the kitchen light flickered on across the parchment. Mum got up, found the magnets from the chippy, and pinned all six sheets to the fridge in the order Dara had left them, sea glass first and lotus last, where we could both see them while we ate our tea.