Black ink drawing of a traditional-style sleeve tattoo design on paper, with a skull, sun, nautical star, compass rose and playing cards, shown as an elongated arm-shaped outline.

Sleeve design with skull, sun and nautical star

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a sleeve-shaped tattoo design filled with traditional and neo-traditional motifs, including a skull with flames, a sun with rays, a smiling cloud, a nautical star, a compass rose, a yin and yang symbol, a peace sign, playing card spades and a rose. The linework is crisp and uniform, with areas filled in using hatching, dots and bold solid black shapes. The design is entirely in black and grey on a plain white background, arranged as a dense, edge-to-edge collage.

Traditional Neo-trad Skull Sun Cloud Compass rose Yin yang Peace sign Playing card Spade Rose Spider web Heart Sleeve

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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 lost property shelf at Hollin Cross had grown so crowded that Tobias Vane sorted it by weather. Umbrellas went left, gloves sat in the middle, and on the right he kept whatever had been carried by someone who expected to arrive somewhere else: a brass sextant with its glass cracked, a tin of boiled sweets, a wooden 8 ball from a fairground stall, and a folded map with a compass rose drawn in the margin in pencil.

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The map belonged to a woman called Ada Reeve, who came back on the last Thursday of every October to ask for it. She had left it on the 4.10 years before and had been walking the county roads ever since, she said, looking for the place it described. Tobias never asked what the place was. He handed her the map and told her the station clock had run four minutes fast since the war, which was how you knew a man was being honest about the time.

On the third October, she did not come. Instead a boy arrived with an ace of spades, its corner chewed by a dog, and a yin and yang button sewn to his cuff. "She said you'd keep these," he said. Tobias put them on the shelf beside the sextant. Then the signal dropped, steam rolled over the platform, and the sky above the cutting turned the colour of a bruised plum.

Ada was in the last carriage of the 4.10, asleep with her head against the glass. The guard swore the train had been empty when it left the sidings. Tobias walked the length of the platform with his lamp and found the map on the bench, folded so the star faced up, and beside it a line in pencil: Hollin Cross, where all the roads meet. He kept it on the shelf after that, under the 8 ball, and nobody ever came back for it.