Cream ceramic travel mug printed with traditional tattoo flash designs, including a lifebuoy with a banner, an anchor, a spyglass, a red rose and a pin-up figure.

Traditional flash designs on a ceramic travel mug

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A cream ceramic travel mug with a black lid, printed all round with traditional tattoo flash motifs. The bold black outlines and flat fills of red, yellow, olive green and orange sit against a speckled cream background, with a lifebuoy banner, anchor, spyglass, rose and a pin-up figure among the designs.

Traditional Anchor Rose Pin-up Star Leaves Banner Mug

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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 lifebuoy was still on its hook when Tom Garrity came up the companionway, and the first thing he did was count it, the way his father had taught him to count anything that could keep a man afloat. One ring, olive and cream, the paint gone chalky with salt. Nobody had thought to take the name off it, so it still read Margaret Lowe in red letters across the front, the same as the boat.

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Ruth Ashby was already at the rail with the spyglass to her eye, her free hand flat on the wet wood the way she held anything she didn't trust. Fog had sat on the Humber since Tuesday, thick enough to swallow the light at Spurn, and somewhere out in it the Dolly Pilot had been sounding her horn for an hour like a cow stuck in a bath. She said left side, nothing, wait, and then, rope.

They pulled alongside a dinghy with its oars shipped and no one in it. A bowline was tied through the ring at the stern, neat as a bell rope, and Tom knew that knot. He had taught it to his sister Nell on the back step in Grimsby when she was seven and bored of him. Nell had never set foot on a boat. She was ashore in Hull with a baby and a husband who sold insurance, and the knot had no business floating in the North Sea.

Ruth passed him the glass without a word. Through the grey, a lantern glowed on the sandbank, and a figure in a yellow oilskin stood up and waved both arms, slow and certain, as if they had been expected all along. Tom reached for the boathook and found his hands were steady, which surprised him. The knot was tight. Whoever had tied it had meant them to come.