Traditional flash sheet of mixed designs
Traditional · Colour · Flash
A flash sheet on aged cream paper showing ten separate tattoo designs arranged in a grid, with scattered small stars and a spider. The designs use bold black outlines with flat colour fills in green, red, yellow, orange and grey, and several have scroll banners carrying short phrases such as Together Forever, Once Bitten and Good Luck. The composition is evenly spaced with each design shown on its own, with no body part visible.
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 shop had closed an hour before, and the lamp over the counter had been switched off, but the sheet pinned beside the radio never really slept. The spider in the top corner was the first to complain, as it always was, that nobody ever looked at the small ones. Its web was the only thing in the room that didn't rattle when the buses went past on the high road. "Nobody picks the web," it said. "They pick the faces."
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The red-masked fellow in the middle of the sheet puffed out his chest, which made his banner rustle. Once Bitten, it said, and he had been picked more than anyone on the page, by lads who wanted to look like they'd had a bad night and a good story. The black-faced heart beside him, Together Forever, had been chosen twice by couples who had since stopped speaking, and it had grown quieter every year. The snake with the Cold Blooded banner yawned and said nothing at all, which everyone agreed was the most convincing thing about him.
The yellow praying hands were the only ones who never boasted. They sat in their little burst of light and waited, as they had waited since the sheet was painted. The pumpkin with its Good Luck scroll offered to read everyone's fortune, and the tiger with Thrill of the Hunt told it to stop being soft, because tigers were not sentimental and everyone knew it.
In the morning the bell over the door rang before the kettle had boiled. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a folded photograph and a small biscuit tin, and she did not look at the masks or the snakes. She looked straight at the hands. "That one," she said. "My husband folded his like that every night." The sheet went very still, and for once the hands did not need anyone to tell them what to do.
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