Sheet of black line drawings of traditional tattoo designs, including roses, skulls, swallows, snakes and anchors, arranged as a character grid.

Traditional tattoo flash glyph sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A grid of small black line drawings of traditional tattoo motifs, each set in its own cell and labelled with a letter, number or symbol. Motifs include roses, skulls, swallows, snakes, daggers, anchors, hearts and a panther, drawn in bold outlines with simple solid fills. The sheet is entirely black ink on white, with the cells arranged in rows across the whole page.

Traditional Rose Skull Swallow Snake Dagger Anchor Heart Panther Butterfly Bird Dragon Ship Flower Flash sheet

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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

By the time the ewes were brought down from the top field, Ruth had emptied the biscuit tin onto the kitchen table and sorted the brass type by letter. Her father had cut every face himself, one motif to a character: a rose, a dagger, a panther crouched low over the P, a swallow with its wings folded for the Y. He had sold sign-painters their stamps for forty years and never once explained why the swallows outnumbered everything else.

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The farm was quiet in the way only January makes it. Frost stood on the water trough until noon. Ruth pressed each face into the wax-paper ledger the way he had taught her, and the marks came out dark and neat in rows. The swallows had gone south in October, as they always did, and the eaves of the cart shed sat empty for the first time since her mother died. She kept one back, the Y, and set it on the windowsill by the stove.

On the last page of the ledger was a message he had never sent, spelled in motifs: a skull, a heart, a ship, a bird. She read it slowly, tracing each shape with a fingernail. It was not an apology, exactly. It was a list of places he had meant to take her, and the final stamp was a swallow pressed so hard it had torn the paper.

At dusk she carried the Y swallow out to the cart shed and fixed it to the nail where the old nest had been. Then she went in, banked the stove, and left the back door open a finger's width for whatever might come back.