Traditional style flash design of three cartoon characters, a vampire, a grinning skeleton and a witch, above a banner reading Three of a Kind and a red rose.

Three of a Kind witches and skeleton flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A flat illustration of three stylised characters, with a pale-faced figure with red flame-like hair on the left, a grinning skeletal figure with red eyes in the centre, and a witch in a purple hat on the right. Bold black outlines, solid fills and fine hatching give a traditional flash look, with purple, red, green and cream used against a plain grey background. A cream banner reading THREE OF A KIND sits across the lower part of the design, above a red rose with green leaves and a web.

Traditional Witch Skeleton Banner Bat Rose Web Flame Hat Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apples were dropping faster than the three of them could gather, so they went out to Haddow's orchard after dark with baskets and no lantern, which was the first thing Widow Haddow had told them never to do. Mab Tanner went first, her hat tipped against the wind off the ridge, muttering about the price of sugar. Ossie Pell came after, watching the bats lift out of the Bramley trees like scraps of burnt paper. Silas Grieve brought up the rear, pale as cream, carrying nothing at all, because in forty years he had never once carried anything he could not eat.

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The fruit was rotten on the ground and sound on the high boughs, and the rule of the orchard was that you took what fell and left the bough alone. Ossie found a web strung between two posts and stood looking at it for a long while. 'Spider's been busy,' he said. 'Whose is it?' 'Nobody's,' said Mab. 'That's the trouble with webs.' They worked until the moon was a thumbnail over the wall. Silas filled his basket without touching an apple, turning each one in his palm and setting it down gently, as though he was counting them out for someone who had not yet come.

At the gate the widow was waiting with a lamp. She counted the baskets, then counted them again, and her mouth went thin. 'Two of you have done a day's work,' she said. 'The third has been eating the shadows.' Mab laughed so hard she dropped her hat in the mud. Then the widow lifted the lamp towards the wall, where a single red rose had pushed up through the old mortar overnight, and nobody in the village could say how it had got there.

They each took a bloom, not the apples, and walked home under the bats with the web catching the lamplight between them like thread on a loom. Ossie said it was the last good harvest in years. Silas said nothing. He only held his rose up to the light and watched the petals darken from red to something older.