Black and grey traditional flash sheet showing a swallow with roses, a butterfly, a tiger head, a snake, a skull in a beanie, a woman with a rose in her hair and an eye.

Traditional flash sheet with swallow and tiger

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of separate traditional designs on a white background, including a butterfly, a swallow with roses on its wing, a tiger head, a coiled snake, a skull wearing a beanie, a woman with a rose in her hair, an eye, a coiled rope, a dagger with flowers, a teardrop and tally marks. Each design uses bold black outlines, solid black fills and grey shading, with clean, even linework. The motifs are arranged loosely across the sheet with plenty of white space between them.

Traditional Butterfly Swallow Rose Tiger Snake Skull Woman Eye Rope Dagger Flower Teardrop Tally marks

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you look at me like that, the swallows always leave before the pears are in. Sit yourself on that upturned crate and I'll tell you how Ada Pryce kept her orchard from the travelling men the summer the tiger came to Hadlow.

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The show arrived every August on a flatbed with a painted cage, and inside the cage was a tiger with a face like a disappointed magistrate. A snake charmer rode in beside it and swore the grass snakes in our hedgerows were his by right. Ada had a length of her father's bailing twine, and she tied the orchard gate shut with the knot he'd taught her, the kind that bites harder the more you pull. The showman pulled. The knot held. He spat in the dust and called her a stubborn cow, which was the nicest thing anyone said to her all week.

Each evening she scratched a tally on the barn door, four upright strokes and a slash through them, one for every day the show stayed. The swallows gathered on the telegraph wire above the Bramley trees, dozens of them, chattering and dropping off the wire like thrown ash, then settling again. She'd stand with her chin on the gate and count them, and they'd count her marks back to her in their own way. "They know how long a thing is meant to last," she told me once, and I didn't argue.

On the last morning of August the wire was bare. The tiger had gone in the night and the wagon ruts ran away down the lane towards the coast. Ada untied the twine, coiled it over her forearm, and went to the barn to finish her tally. She counted the strokes twice. Then she looked up, and there on the wire sat one late swallow, watching her, not yet ready to leave.