Black ink traditional flash sheet showing a skull, a sun, a bat, a spider web, an eagle and a snail, drawn in a bold outline style with shading.

Traditional flash sheet of skulls and symbols

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of small tattoo designs arranged in a grid on cream paper, including a skull, a sun with a face, a bat, a spider web, an eagle, a snail and a heart with tears. The designs use bold black outlines with stippled or hatched shading and no colour. The sheet is photographed at a slight angle on a wooden surface, with the designs filling most of the frame.

Traditional Skull Sun Bat Spider web Eagle Heart Dagger Umbrella Nail Flower Bell Cat Hand Woman

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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

Tuesday, the ninth. Mrs Ada Quayle came in again with the brass bell from the old fire station, wrapped in a tea towel as if it might wake the dead. She wants eleven shillings on it. I told her the bell is worth four, and she told me the bell is worth nothing at all to anyone but her, which is the first sensible thing said across my counter this month.

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I have started keeping a tally of the things people bring in with a picture attached. Not photographs, drawings: the sheet of small designs pinned behind the door of Harrow's print shop across the road, the one with the skull and the sun and the snail, which Mrs Quayle's grandson sold her for a penny. She cannot read the lettering but she knows every shape. She tapped the spider web and then the nails and said, "Those are the ones that keep things in." Then she laid down the dagger, the one with the hand under it, and asked whether a hand holding a dagger was worth more than a hand holding nothing.

I gave her the eleven shillings for the bell. It is not a fool's sum, but I am not a fool either. Before she left she asked me to keep the snail back for her, the slow one, because she bought it to remind her that some things arrive in their own time. I wrote that in the ledger too, under the bat and the fly and the umbrella, where it reads very much like a list of things a woman could not keep out of the rain.