Black line drawing flash sheet of traditional tattoo designs, including a ship, anchor, dagger through a heart, snake, swallow on a padlock and diamond in a laurel wreath, with no placement shown.

Traditional flash sheet of nautical and classic motifs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of about thirty small monoline tattoo designs arranged on a cream background. The motifs include a sailing ship, dagger and heart, snake and dagger, anchor, ship's wheel, revolver, dice, scythe, swallow on a padlock, horseshoe and a banner reading RIDE. The linework is uniform black with no shading, and the composition is a loose vertical grid of separate elements.

Traditional Ship Anchor Dagger Heart Snake Dice Revolver Scythe Swallow Padlock Key Horseshoe Diamond Laurel Eye Crown Axe Rose Ship wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody came to Halloran's Travelling Show that October except the rain. From the back of the wagon I counted the crowd by the drip of umbrellas, eleven of them, and Vell still rang the bell for the knife-thrower because the man was owed his shilling and because the banner over the ring still said RIDE, though the letters had faded to the colour of weak tea.

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I kept the books, which is how I knew the horseshoe nailed above the centre pole was the only thing we owned that hadn't been sold. Fenn sold his revolver in Dorking to pay for the diesel. The dice went on a card game in Guildford, where Vell lost them with the same easy grace he once used to lose at patience. Every night the lamp smoked a little more and the trapeze wire sang a little higher, and every night Nell sat on the caravan step with her father's old key on a string round her neck, as if the lock it fitted were still out there somewhere, waiting for us.

The sea was the answer, Vell said. There was a pier at Weymouth that had hosted a show every summer since his grandfather's day, and a harbourmaster there who still owed him a favour dating back to a bear and a rowing boat. We reached the coast on a Thursday with the wagons held together by wire. The wind came off the water and turned the wheel of the Ferris stall, and the ship rocking at its mooring looked, from the pier, as though it had been waiting all along for someone to come aboard.

Nell slipped the key from her neck and let it drop into the harbour. "Other side of the lock now," she said, and went to find a broom for the sawdust.