A black and white flash sheet with red accents, showing traditional tattoo designs themed around the number thirteen, including a cat, skull, dagger, heart and eye.

Thirteen themed traditional flash sheet

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A flash sheet of many small traditional-style tattoo designs on a cream background framed by black wavy patterning, most built around the number 13. Designs include a cat, skulls, a devil, a heart, a dagger, a knife, an eye, cherries, a snake, a goat's head and a pin-up portrait, drawn in bold black outlines with grey shading. Red is used sparingly for blood, hearts and cherries, so the sheet is mostly black and grey with touches of colour.

Traditional Cat Skull Devil Heart Dagger Knife Eye Cherry Snake Goat Pin-up Candle Hourglass Spider web Feather Gun Bicycle Black cat Tally marks

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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

Nobody on Hebble Row would say the number out loud on a shift. Mam called it the cat's number and set a saucer of milk by the back door on the twelfth of every month, just in case. So when the deputy handed me my check tag and it read thirteen, I left it on the nail by the lamp room and took the spare brass instead. Ned Fallon saw me do it and laughed until he had to sit down on the coal bunker.

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We went down at half five with the candle in the lamp room burning steady, which Ned said was a good sign and I said was only wax. The cage dropped past the old seam and stuck at four hundred feet, swinging like a bell rope with nothing to ring. Ned sat on the bench and scratched tally marks into the timber with his pocketknife, five strokes and a gap, five and a gap, until the wall looked like a fence someone had given up on. I counted them because counting was easier than listening to the rock tick.

Somewhere above us a bell went, then another, and I thought of the hourglass on Mam's sill and how she turned it whenever the kettle needed watching. At the thirteenth stroke the cage jerked, the candle guttered, and the whole shaft went quiet except for Ned saying my name twice. Then the winch took up and we rose into a dawn so grey it looked painted on, and the first face I saw in the yard was Mam's, with the saucer of milk in her hands, waiting as if she had known all along.

I kept the spare brass in my pocket after that. It is still there, warm from my leg, and Mam still puts out the milk.