A traditional flash sheet printed in cream on navy blue, showing a sheet of tattoo designs including a skull eagle crest, pistols, roses, a shark, a snake and a woman's bust.

Traditional flash sheet in cream on navy

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A printed flash sheet of American traditional tattoo designs held up by a person whose face is out of frame. The designs include an eagle with a skull crest, two revolvers, roses, a shark, a snake, hands holding a rose and a skull bottle, a woman's bust, a pocket watch and a tomahawk with feathers. The linework is bold and solid, rendered in cream on a flat navy background with no shading.

Traditional Eagle Skull Pistol Revolver Rose Shark Snake Hand Feather Pocket watch Clock Woman Eye Bottle Flower Star Crescent Pentagram

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis Pryce had worked the Dover booth for nineteen years and could usually tell a lie from the weather in the first ten seconds. The man in the Volvo had a quick smile and a rolled cardboard tube under his arm, and when Dennis asked what was inside, the smile stayed put while the rest of him went still.

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On the steel table the sheet came out flat and stubborn. Navy paper, cream lines, a dozen small pictures crowded together like a shop window: a black-winged eagle with a skull on its shield, two revolvers with scrolled grips, a shark with its jaw wrenched open, a snake lifting its head, a hand holding a bottle marked with a skull. "Stock for a parlour in Margate," the man said. "Flash. Nobody's using it, it's just paper."

Dennis turned the sheet over with the tip of a pen. On the reverse, in faded typewriter, someone had typed Hollis and Daughter, Proofs, 1974. The pocket watch in the top corner had its hands stopped at a quarter to twelve, the Roman numerals crisp and patient. He thought of his own father's watch, which had been stopped since the funeral, and found he was not in any hurry.

"Hollis was my uncle," the man said at last, to the floor. "The shop shut when he did. I'm taking the lot to a museum in Hastings. They want the drawings before anyone else gets them."

Dennis stamped the form and let him through. That evening he pinned a photocopy above his kettle, where the eagle could keep an eye on the queue, and left the watch exactly where it was.