Hand-drawn traditional flash designs on tracing paper, including a rose, a bowed heart, a beaded heart locket, a crown, and a beetle, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flash sheet with roses and hearts

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A sheet of hand-drawn tattoo flash on overlapping tracing paper, with ink pens lying across it. The designs include a rose with leaves, a beaded heart with a bow and ribbon, a beaded heart locket, a large open rose with a crown above it, a beetle, and a pistol-like object with a fish tail. The linework is bold and black, with light red and blue accents in places and minimal shading.

Traditional Rose Heart Bow Ribbon Crown Beetle Pearl Fish Pistol

Find an artist for this

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

You find the sheet pinned under a faded takeaway menu on the noticeboard in the lobby of Harrow Point, the tracing paper gone soft and wavy as a wet postcard. Somebody has drawn everything on it twice, once in pencil and once in ink, as if they could not trust the first go. A rose with its leaves tucked under like a hand of cards. A heart strung with pearls, a ribbon tied in a bow that looks too tidy for the rest of the sheet. A beetle with its legs folded. You take it home to the eleventh floor, where the lift only works on alternate Tuesdays, and lay it on the kitchen table under the strip light.

Keep reading

Nobody in the block will say who drew it. Mrs Okafor on six reckons it was Ray from the flats above the bins, who did tattoos in his kitchen until the council took his licence, and who sold these sheets for a fiver a time to lads on the estate. Ray is dead now, or in Spain, depending who you ask. You trace the crown over the open rose with a biro, then the locket, then the pistol with the fish tail sprouting from its grip, which you decide is either a joke or a warning. Every design on the sheet seems to want to be somebody's skin.

By the time the sun is coming through the gap between the flats opposite, you have worked out which one is yours. It is not the rose or the heart. It is the locket, because it opens, and you have spent three years keeping things shut. You carry the sheet down eleven flights in the dark, step out onto the walkway, and hold it up against the glass of the bus shelter by the car park, where the first number 14 is pulling in with its lights already on.