Close-up of leggings printed with traditional-style tattoo flash designs, including a geisha head, owl, cat, skulls and roses, worn on the legs.

Tattoo flash print leggings

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

Printed leggings cover both legs with a dense pattern of tattoo flash designs, including a geisha head, an owl, a cat, sugar skulls, a cupcake and a cube. The illustrations use bold black and blue-grey outlines and shading, with red, orange and yellow accents on the owl, the flowers and the cheeks. The motifs are arranged edge to edge across the fabric, with a bright orange flower near the bottom of each leg.

Traditional Geisha Owl Cat Skull Sugar skull Cupcake Cube Rose Flower Lightning bolt Heart Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flash sheet had hung above the autoclave for nineteen years, and nobody thought to look behind it until the damp got in. Keeley peeled back the corner with a palette knife and found a second sheet underneath, drawn in the same blue-grey ink with the same hard black edges, every figure a little more crowded than the last. There was the geisha with a tiny city balanced in her hair, the owl with its lightning bolt, the cat clutching a red heart, a cube stacked on a pair of hands. In the bottom corner someone had written in pencil: Harrow, 1961. Under it, smaller: Do not sell these.

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Harrow had never been a man for secrets, only for stock. He drew flash for sailors and factory girls and anyone with a shilling and a bad night, and his sheets were pinned in every shop from Deal to Dover. The framed ones went home in kitbags. The sheet behind the sheet had never been meant for anyone's skin. Keeley had heard the regulars' stories: the cupcake that appeared on a girl's ankle the week before her wedding, the sugar skull that went to a barman who never touched another drop.

She pinned the top sheet back over it and went home. In the morning the sombrero skeleton had shifted, its sandals kicked to the paper's edge, and a faint pencilled line ran from the gravestone to a blank corner where Harrow had left room. The stone was still empty. Nobody had drawn the name yet.

She fetched her good pencils from the drawer and her hand stayed steady. She wrote the first letter, a K, and the ink took it as though it had been waiting. By lunchtime the stone was finished, and the kettle had boiled dry.