Flash design of a red and black skull with lightning-bolt eyes above the words SEMPRE OLTRE, beside a black cat with red eyes above the words LA NOTTE È LUNGA, in a traditional style.

Skull and black cat flash with Italian lettering

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows two separate designs on a cream background. On the left, a white skull with lightning-bolt eyes and a red tongue sits beneath the words SEMPRE OLTRE, drawn with bold black outlines and dot shading. On the right, a black cat-like head with red eyes, a red nose and a toothed mouth sits beneath the words LA NOTTE È LUNGA, with spiky fur-like linework and a limited red and black palette.

Traditional Skull Cat Lightning bolt Tongue Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The black cat had claimed the top of the fish van's freezer before the rain set in, and by eleven it had no intention of leaving. Dario Pell stood under the awning of the closed flower stall, rolling a cigarette he would not light, and watched the drips fall from the tarpaulin in a line of small silver beads. "It's not your roof," he said. The cat blinked at him with four red eyes and went on washing one paw.

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Dario's grandmother had run the sign-painting shop at the top of the market for forty years. Her last commission hung above the gate: a skull with a tongue like a dropped scarf and two lightning bolts for eyes, painted the summer she lost the sight of one eye to a bread oven. Beneath it she had lettered SEMPRE OLTRE, always beyond, because she said that was what the market was for. Dario had never asked which side of the gate she meant.

At midnight the cat jumped down, landed soft beside the bins and walked straight to the shutter of the shop. It sat and stared at the padlock as if it held a key. Dario sighed, fetched the spare from the hook behind the till and found the bolt stiff with rain. When the metal finally gave, the cat slipped inside ahead of him, tail up, and settled on the stool where his grandmother used to work.

He found her brushes standing in a jar and, under a sheet of tracing paper, the first draft of a second board. The capitals were careful: LA NOTTE È LUNGA. The night is long. He hung the lamp, dipped a brush in black, and began on the cat's whiskers, because it seemed rude to leave the work half finished with a witness watching.