Traditional style flash sheet showing a retro television, a cassette with a flower and banner, a dark hand with a banner, and two round badges.

Traditional flash of TV, cassette, hand and banners

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

This flash sheet shows five designs on a cream background: a red retro television with a slogan on its screen, a cassette tape with a green and orange flower and a banner reading HEAVY DIRTY SOUL, a black hand wrapped in a banner, and two overlapping round badges. The designs use bold black outlines, solid fills and simple shading. The palette mixes red, teal, green and orange with black and grey.

Traditional Flower Hand Banner Badge Lettering Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The estate car had declared one television and a kettle, which is the kind of tidy honesty that makes me reach for the torch. The television was orange and cream, with aerial ears that hadn't caught a signal since the nineties. Someone had written across its screen in marker, WE DON'T BELIEVE WHAT'S ON TV, and underlined it twice. I laughed. The driver did not laugh, and he kept both hands on the wheel at ten to two the whole time I was looking.

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In the boot, under a folded blanket, there was a shoebox of cassettes with HEAVY DIRTY SOUL written on each spine in careful biro. Nothing rattling, nothing hidden in the lining. Just a dozen tapes with the plastic tabs snapped out so nobody could record over them. I asked whose band it was. He said it was his sister's, recorded in a garage outside Ostrava, never pressed past the first run. He said it the way people mention the weather.

I found the glove last, in the glovebox: black leather, fingers curled as if it had only just let go of something. Tied round the wrist was a strip of ribbon, and on it, in the same biro, SHAKING HANDS WITH THE DARK PARTS OF MY THOUGHTS. I asked if it was contraband. He looked at me for a long time and said it was for the nerves, and that it worked better than the tablets.

I stamped his form, handed back the shoebox and didn't look at it again. That night in the booth, with the radio off and the strip lights buzzing, I put one of the tapes in the old player we keep for seized goods. A woman counted in four, badly, and laughed when she got it wrong. Then the drums came in, and I sat there with the stamp still warm in my hand.