A cream flash sheet of many small black line drawings, including keys, skulls, hearts, a syringe, an eye, a pyramid and a hamburger, in a fine line style with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small flash sheet of black line tattoo designs

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of many small black line drawings on cream paper, arranged in a loose grid with lettering such as 666, 50 TUESDAYS and DUNCE between the motifs. The designs are drawn with simple, even linework and no shading, and they include keys, skulls, hearts, an eye, a pyramid, a syringe, a gun, a hamburger and a mushroom. The composition is dense and unframed, with each motif sitting on its own in the open paper.

Fine line Key Skull Heart Eye Pyramid Gun Mushroom Flower Lightning bolt Umbrella Dice Dagger 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

The sheet came off the printer still smelling of cheap cream paper, and Mags pinned it above the till at the Harbour Street parlour with four drawing pins and a look that said nobody would book anything off it. Thirty years she'd run that shop, and she believed flash was for people with no imagination who needed a menu.

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The lad from the trawler Dorothy May came in on a wet Tuesday, asking for something that said fifty Tuesdays, which was how his mother counted weeks at sea. He stood under the sheet for an hour, reading it the way his skipper read the shipping forecast: a key, a key with no lock, a cup, a pyramid with an eye that had seen too much, a skull with a crooked grin. He chose the small heart with a tiny key threaded through it, and Mags charged him the flash price, which she had never once done for anybody.

I did the linework that afternoon with a hand that wouldn't keep still, and the lightning bolt in the corner came out too thin at one end. I wanted to redraw it. Mags took the needle out of my fingers and said that the wobbles were the only honest bits on any page.

Ten years on, the sheet is still above the till, yellowed at the edges, and the lad still comes in every spring with his daughter, who asks what the cup of tea means. He tells her it means you always get a second go, and Mags, who never believed a word of flash, nods and charges him nothing.