White line drawings of traditional tattoo flash motifs, including an eagle, skulls, a hand, a bear and a skeleton, on a black fabric tapestry hung against a white wall.

Traditional flash sheet on black fabric

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black fabric sheet printed with many white line drawings of traditional tattoo flash motifs arranged in a grid. Subjects include an eagle, a bear, a open hand, several skulls, a skeleton, a key, feathers, an anchor, dice, a sun, moon faces and tally marks. The fine, hatched linework is white on black, with no colour, and the sheet is photographed flat against a plain wall.

Traditional Eagle Bear Hand Skull Skeleton Key Feather Anchor Dice Sun Tally marks Hourglass Bone Bird Snake Arrow Laurel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tally on the lintel had reached forty when the fog came down over Skerrow and took the morning ferry with it. My father always said the island kept its own calendar, cut into whatever wood was nearest, and that the only honest clock we owned was the hourglass in the chapel porch, which the minister turned every Sunday whether anyone listened or not. I had grown up counting by it, and I had never once trusted the sea to bring anything back on time.

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The stranger came off the last boat before the weather closed, a feather in his hat band and a bear's tooth on a cord at his throat. He set a leather cup of bone dice on the table and offered a brass key to the chest under my brother's bunk, against the anchor hanging over our door. I told him Tam had been gone forty days. He said that was exactly why the chest had waited.

We played until the lamp guttered. Each time he threw, the fog pressed harder against the glass, and a gull settled on the sill to watch with one dark eye. On my last throw I shook the cup until my wrists ached, then let the dice spill across the wood. Two sixes. He smiled, slid the key over, and was gone before the door had finished swinging.

The chest held only a folded sail, a tin of salt and a sheet of paper on which Tam had drawn the sun rising over a skull. Outside, the fog thinned and the moon hung low over the water, pale as a face that had seen everything. I lifted the anchor from its hook, carried it to the lintel, and beside the fortieth mark I scratched a fresh one, for the day I stopped waiting.