Seamless black and white line pattern of traditional flash motifs, including hearts with banners, daggers, a skull, an eye, a diamond, an anchor and an eight ball.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flash pattern of hearts, daggers and skulls

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A repeating seamless pattern of traditional-style flash motifs drawn in black linework on a pale off-white background. The motifs include hearts with banners reading MOM, LUCKY DAY and LOVE, daggers, a skull with a spike, a bottle marked XXX with crossbones, an all-seeing eye, a diamond, anchors, stars, a ship's wheel and an eight ball reading GOOD LUCK. The shapes are arranged in evenly spaced rows across the frame with no shading.

Traditional Heart Banner Dagger Skull Bottle Crossbones Eye Diamond Anchor Star Spade Arrow Lightning bolt Cross Ship wheel Swallow Pattern

Find an artist for this

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 flash sheet came off the bulkhead of the Marigold the night we lost the mainsail off Flamborough, and Dorrie Pask swore on her mother's Bible that the eight ball had caused it. She'd bought the thing in Hull from a man with one eye and a parrot that cursed in Dutch. Every hand aboard had drawn something on that sheet, and Dorrie's rule was that nobody got a dagger until they'd earned one.

Keep reading

Old Teddy Vane had done the skull with the spike, a little dig at the bosun who had tried to stop his tobacco. The hearts were for wives nobody had seen in years. Teddy drew the bottle marked XXX because he said a bottle was the only honest thing a man could carry through a storm, and he'd carried plenty. When the sheet got soaked the ink bled into the grain of the paper, so every design went a little grey at the edges, like a bruise that had decided to stay.

We limped into the Humber with the pump going and the sheet pinned to the galley wall by a rusted tack. Nobody wanted to take it down. Dorrie stood under it with her arms folded and said the eight ball would be the last thing painted over, and she'd be the one to say when. Then she bought the whole crew a round out of the money she'd been saving for a new sail.

Forty years on, I still have the sheet. The eye has faded to a smudge and the lightning bolt looks like a crack in the plaster, but the eight ball sits dead centre where Teddy's pencil left it, GOOD LUCK running round its middle in letters I can barely read. I pin it above the bar in the front room now, and when a young hand asks what it's for I tell them it's a map of everything we were too stubborn to throw away.