Black and grey traditional flash sheet of a cathedral with onion domes, compass roses, a skull, an anchor, crossed bones and barbed wire motifs on a white background.

Traditional flash sheet with cathedral and nautical motifs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of separate tattoo designs on a white background, arranged around a central cathedral with onion domes. The designs include two compass roses, a skull, anchors, a coffin, a spider, crossed bones, nails wrapped in barbed wire and a razor blade, drawn in bold outlines with solid black fills. Dotted stippling creates the cloud-like shapes at the top and sides, and the sheet is entirely black ink on white.

Traditional Dotwork Compass rose Skull Anchor Coffin Spider Nail Horseshoe Tally marks Scissors Needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tallies on the lamp room wall had spread past the plaster and onto the boards by the spring of the strike. Four upright strokes and one across for every shift a man came up alive. Nobody bothered with the ones who did not come up. My mother said that was the only honest bookkeeping the company ever did.

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My uncle Ansel had gone to sea as a boy and come ashore at nineteen with a bad chest and a pocket full of knots. For the Whitsun fair he carved a cathedral out of pit props, six onion domes bent from offcuts, each one crowned with a cross he filed from a dead nail. He blackened the walls with coal dust and lamp oil so they gleamed like wet slate. When the fair committee asked what it was for, he said it was for the men who had gone down and not come back, and that a church was only a light left burning in the right place.

The company clerk came with his notebook on the Saturday and offered two pounds for it, then four. Ansel only shook his head and went on nailing a horseshoe above the door for luck. On Sunday night we wheeled the thing to the pit head in a handcart, wrapped in old sailcloth, and rode it down on the first cage with a tin of peaches and a bundle of candles. We stood it on the lowest landing where the water came up to our ankles and lit the candles one by one.

When the cage came back up the next morning I counted the bells, the way you do. Then, without quite deciding to, I took the chalk from my pocket and drew one more stroke on the lamp room boards. Four upright and one across. Somewhere below, a cathedral stood in the black with its domes catching the light, and it would still be standing long after the company had painted over the walls.