Vintage traditional flash sheet showing daggers, snakes, an eagle with a Death Before Dishonor banner, a rose, and a demon head, with handwritten pay in advance lettering.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flash sheet with daggers, snakes and an eagle

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A vintage flash sheet on aged paper showing several traditional designs: daggers wrapped in snakes, an eagle with a banner reading Death Before Dishonor, a rose pierced by a dagger, and a horned demon head. The linework is bold and black, with red, green, yellow and blue fills. The sheet is arranged with the designs spread across the page, with handwritten prices and notes around them.

Traditional Dagger Snake Eagle Rose Banner Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pa Hollis kept the flash sheet pinned above the stove in Stepney, and every price on it was wrong by the time anyone read it. The eagle cost eight shillings in 1938 and then six pounds after the war, the new figure written over the old in pencil that smudged whenever the kettle steamed. Nobody argued with the sheet. Men came in off the docks with their wages in their fists and pointed at whatever they wanted, and the one thing Pa insisted on was that they pay in advance.

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Then a lad named Teddy Quill came in one wet Thursday, eighteen and sure of himself, wanting the dagger with the red snake wound round its hilt. He had no money. He had a girl's ribbon in one pocket and a promise in the other. Pa looked at him for a long time over his spectacles, then took the pencil from behind his ear and wrote a new price beside the dagger, one with no pounds or shillings in it: a night on the bench under the eagle, and a message carried to the girl before the milk van came.

Teddy laughed, then he didn't. He slept on the bench with his boots on and the ribbon knotted round his wrist. In the morning the snake on the sheet had moved its head a finger's width nearer the blade, and Pa said nothing about it, only ran a thumb along the needle and handed it over.

The girl's name was Ada, and she came in the following week to ask what the lad had paid. Pa told her it was the usual, and she didn't believe him, which was fair, because it was the first honest price he had ever written.