Traditional style flash sheet of repeating tattoo designs, including daggers through skulls, swallows, pin-up women, hearts, roses and a scorpion, on a tan background.

Traditional flash sheet with skulls, hearts and pin-ups

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A repeating sheet of traditional tattoo flash showing skulls with daggers, swallows, pin-up women, mermaids, hearts with roses, a scorpion, dice, snakes, sharks, swordfish and butterflies, scattered among small black stars. The designs use bold black outlines with red, green, yellow and blue fills on a tan background. The motifs are spaced evenly across the sheet in a dense, all-over arrangement.

Traditional Skull Dagger Swallow Pin-up Mermaid Heart Rose Scorpion Dice Snake Shark Butterfly Horseshoe Fleur-de-lis Star Top hat Fish Beetle

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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 customs man at Harwick held my sheet up to the strip light as if the ink might be hiding something. "Forty-two designs," he said. "Who draws forty-two of anything on one piece of paper?"

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"My uncle Len did," I said. "Thirty years of pinning it to the wall of his booth on the pier. The swallows are his. The dice too. He always said a man should have a little gamble on him."

He turned it over and back again. The skull with the dagger through it grinned like a ticket inspector. The mermaid had worn paint on her tail where Len's thumb had rubbed her a thousand times. Behind the counter the radio was reading the shipping forecast, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and I counted the black stars on the sheet so I wouldn't have to watch him.

Flash is meant to be copied, Len always said. Every sailor who sat in his chair picked one small thing to carry off the boat and into the rest of his life. The swordfish went to a man bound for Valparaíso, and the top hat to a barber from Grimsby who never once paid for it on time.

The officer folded the sheet along its old crease and slid it back across the counter. "Go on, then," he said. "Tell your uncle the scorpion's still my favourite." I said I would, though Len had been dead since March, and I put the sheet inside my jacket where the rain couldn't reach it.