Traditional style flash designs of a swallow, a rose, a dagger, a sparrow, blossoms and a heart, painted in colour on pale paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flash sheet with swallow, rose and dagger

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A painted flash sheet of traditional tattoo designs on pale paper, including a swallow, a pink rose with green leaves, a dagger, a sparrow, a heart and several blossoms. Bold black outlines frame flat colour in pinks, greens, reds and browns, with simple shading on the petals and leaves. The designs are arranged loosely across the sheet, with some overlapping at the edges.

Traditional Swallow Rose Dagger Bird Heart Blossom Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dunmore had been watching swallows over the Humber since the tide turned, and Nell Pryor, who kept the chandlery on Wharf Street, said he would watch them to his grave if he didn't come in and eat. He came in with salt on his collar and a sheet of paper folded inside his oilskin, the flash the man in Hull had painted up for sailors who had nothing to show for a season but a wage and a bad memory.

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He unfolded it on the counter between the tin of tacks and the bowl of lemon drops. The swallow was for coming home, he said, and the sparrow for the little ones who would not know his face. The rose was for her, the dagger for the mate who had called him a coward in the Crown, and the heart was for nobody yet. He tapped the blossoms, pink as the inside of a shell, and said the painter had knocked a shilling off them because they were common and he'd been plain about it.

Nell pinched the corner and turned the sheet over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a list of ports, Riga, Bilbao, Cardiff, Valparaiso, and at the bottom a name that was hers, with a question mark after it that had been rubbed out and drawn again.

She took the tacks from the wall and pinned the flash above the counter where the tide tables had hung, lemon drops and all. Outside, the first swallows dropped low over the water, sorting themselves into the wind, and the bell over the door went once for nobody at all.