Purple and teal illustration of a skull and crossbones filled with traditional tattoo flash motifs such as roses, swallows, stars and banners.

Skull and crossbones with traditional flash motifs

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A stylised skull and crossbones drawn in black linework with purple and teal shading. The skull and bones are filled with white-outlined traditional flash motifs, including roses, a swallow, guitars, diamonds, stars, a heart and banners reading LOVE, ROCK and LUCK. The design fills the frame on a plain black background.

Traditional Skull Crossbones Rose Swallow Guitar Diamond Star Heart Banner Dagger Love Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had to be finished before the tide, and Mae Corrigan had two hours of paint and one bad temper between her and the slip. Her father's old flash book lay open on an upturned crate beside her tin of purple, its corners gone soft as cloth. She had copied every rose from it as a girl, and the swallow, and the guitar nobody in Saltcombe had ever heard played.

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The harbourmaster's nephew came down the stone steps with a bag of rivets and asked whether the banners would say what the commission said. LOVE on the left temple, ROCK across the brow, LUCK under the cheekbone, where the old men claimed a sailor's luck always ran out first. 'Spelling's fine,' Mae said. 'It's the luck I'm worried about.'

By noon the crossbones ran the length of the dinghy's bow, and the teal had come up bright under the black hatching the way she had wanted it. She turned to the last page of the book, where her father had drawn a dagger through a heart and crossed it out in pencil, and she left it alone. Then she signed the bottom corner of the transom in small white letters, the same outline as the roses, and sat back on the crate to wait for the water.