Black and grey traditional flash sheet of skulls, an eagle, a reaper, a pigeon, a deer head, a sun, and two feathered headdresses, with no placement shown.

Traditional flash sheet in black and grey

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of traditional-style flash designs arranged across the page, including skulls, a grim reaper, an eagle, a pigeon, a deer head, a dagger, a revolver, and anatomical figures. The work uses bold outlines with dense hatching, stippling and solid black fills on a pale background. Everything is rendered in black ink and greys, with no colour.

Traditional Skull Eagle Deer Sun Dagger Revolver Headdress Skeleton Anatomy Hourglass Mandala Wing Cross Pipe Rose Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reaper came up the lane in the last of the light, asking at every door for Tobias Marsh, and every door shut in his face. He had a scythe over one shoulder and an hourglass under his arm, and the sand in it was already low. Mrs Pell at the forge saw him pass and told her son to bar the shutters.

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Tobias was not at home. He was out on the sea wall with a heel of bread in one hand and a paper of salt cod in the other, feeding the grey pigeons that roosted in the chapel roof. He had kept them since his mother died, and he knew each one by its ragged feather. When the stranger's shadow fell across the stones, the birds lifted all at once, and one of them, a hen with a torn left wing, did not come down again. She flew straight at the man in black, circled his hood and settled on the hourglass.

Tobias bargained. He offered the reaper his good knife, his boots, the clock from the parlour, and finally the sea wall itself, which he said was rightly the sea's and not Death's. The reaper only turned the glass so the sand ran back up toward his thumb. 'Give me a hen's worth of time,' Tobias said at last, 'and I will give you a thing nobody has ever offered you, which is a song.' The reaper laughed, a dry sound like a cart over gravel, and said that was no fair trade. But he sat down on the wall to hear it.

Tobias sang until the tide came up over the stones and the cod was gone. When he stopped, the hourglass was empty, and the hen had folded her torn wing against her side. The reaper stood, shouldered his scythe and went down the lane without a word. Tobias fed the pigeons the next morning, and every morning after, and the hen with the torn wing was always first to the crumbs.