Traditional style flash sheet of many small coloured tattoo designs, including hearts, roses, daggers, pin-ups and animals, all lettered with True Love and framed by TATTOO at the top and bottom.

True Love traditional flash sheet

Traditional · Colour · Flash

This is a full flash sheet of many small traditional-style tattoo designs on a cream background, with TRUE LOVE across the top and TATTOO across the bottom. The designs include hearts, roses, daggers, swallows, skulls, pin-up women, sailors, animals, dice, a peacock and a clock, most outlined in black and filled with bold red, green, yellow and blue. Each motif is arranged in a loose grid with banners and scrolled lettering, and the sheet is mostly colour.

Traditional Heart Rose Dagger Swallow Skull Pin-up Sailor Dice Peacock Shark Hourglass Diamond Horseshoe Clover Bottle Envelope Mouse Banner

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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

Dear Ruby, the ink on this page is still tacky from the galley table, so forgive the smudge over the word Hull. Mr Pruett has finally let me take the big sheet off the parlour wall, the one with TRUE LOVE across the top and TATTOO along the bottom in red letters like a fairground poster. He says he drew half the hearts himself on a wet Sunday in 1936 and copied the rest off a Bristol man who owed him money.

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I counted the things on it last night by the lamp in the bunk. Forty-one hearts, if you count the banners, eight daggers, three swallows that look like they've been in a fight, a shark the size of my thumb chasing nothing, and a peacock with its tail fanned out like a lady's hand of cards. There's a clock with the sand already run through and two green dice showing sixes, which Mr Pruett says is either luck or a warning, depending on who is paying.

The thing I keep looking at is the little mouse in the bottom corner, up on his hind legs with his paws together as if he's begging. Pruett says the sailors always wanted the mouse because it means you'll always find your way back to the ship. I told him that was rubbish. He laughed and said I'd know soon enough.

I'm sending the sheet with this letter. Keep it flat, Ruby, and don't let Mam pin it up in the kitchen where the steam gets at it. Put your own name on the blank banner at the top right, the one with nothing written in it yet. I'll be home to see it when the tide turns, and then we'll see whose hand is steadier.