Black line flash sheet of traditional tattoo designs, most featuring the number 13, including a rose, skulls, a swallow, a butterfly, a dagger and a heart with a banner.

Thirteen themed flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white flash sheet of traditional-style tattoo designs on a plain background. Most designs feature the number 13 or the word thirteen, shown through banners, hearts, a skull, a butterfly, a swallow, a snake, a dagger and a woman in a bonnet. The bold, even outlines are drawn with solid black ink, with light solid fills and small dot details, and the designs are arranged in a loose grid.

Traditional Number Rose Skull Heart Butterfly Swallow Snake Dagger Star Banner Lily Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old women of Hallow Cross said the orchard had thirteen trees, though anyone who walked it counted twelve and a grey stump. Ruth Penrose kept it after her husband went down the mine and did not come back up. Every August she sat beneath the last tree in the row, the one that was not a stump, and peeled windfalls into a bowl while the wasps drank from the grass.

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One year a swallow came early and built its mud cup in the fork of that tree. Ruth let it be, because her mother had said a nest left alone brings a good year. Then a carter called Abel Crane came up the lane with empty barrels, looking for the sweetest apples in the valley. 'Not from that one,' Ruth said. 'It has never borne a single fruit in my life.' He only smiled and said he would come back when the moon was round.

That night the moon was round, and Ruth went out with a lantern. The tree hung with thirteen red apples, warm as hands. She counted them twice, the way her mother counted eggs, and understood that the orchard had never been waiting for a buyer. It had been waiting for someone to leave the last one on the branch.

She picked the other twelve into her apron and left the thirteenth where it hung. In the morning the swallow was feeding three open mouths in its nest, and the apple had split in the sun, sweet as honey and full of wasps. Abel Crane came up the lane at noon, took his twelve barrels and paid her in silver, and never once looked up at the tree.