White line drawings on a black background of traditional tattoo flash, including a skull with a dagger, a horseshoe, an anvil, roses, an envelope reading I HATE YOU and a spider web.

Traditional flash sheet with skull, dagger and horseshoe

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of nine or more white line tattoo designs on a black background, arranged in a grid with small star and flower fillers. The designs include a skull pierced by a dagger, a horseshoe with a heart, an anvil with a heart and flowers, two eyes with tears, a pair of clasped hands, roses, a spider web and an envelope with the words I HATE YOU. The linework is bold and even with no shading, so the sheet reads as black and white only.

Traditional Skull Dagger Horseshoe Heart Eye Tear Hand Rose Flower Envelope Spider web Star Lettering

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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

The nail went in crooked for the third time, and Nell Scarrow pulled it with the tongs and flung it into the bucket hard enough to ring. The mare shifted her weight and blew a plume of breath that hung in the barn like smoke from a cold pipe. Frost had furred the inside of the window. Her grandfather's anvil stood where it had stood for sixty years, its face worn smooth except for the heart he had punched into the waist of it.

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The envelope lay on the bench beside the rasp. Cal had left it there the night before, sealed with a blob of candle wax and her name in capitals across the front, then gone back up to the bothy without a word. She knew what it said without opening it. He had been shouting it across the yard since the sale of the top field, and the paper would only be the shouting kept in ink. Still, she propped it against the vice, where she could see it every time she lifted the hammer.

By dusk the shoe was finished and cooling on the step, and the mare was stamping in the straw at the sound of the gate. Nell sat on an upturned bucket and cracked the wax with her thumbnail. Inside was a single sheet, folded small. The words were there again, crossed through in pencil so hard the paper had torn. Underneath, in the careful hand that had signed their father's cheques for years, he had written: Lambing starts Monday. I cannot do the nights on my own. Bring the good tongs.

She read it twice, then went out into the yard, where the light was going blue on the snow. Up the track one window glowed in the bothy. Nell hung the horseshoe over the barn door with its open end up, the way her grandfather had taught her to keep the luck from running out, and went to find her coat.