24/08/2026
MARKS BEFORE MEMORY — CAVE ART TATTOO FLASH
Long before paper, printing presses, tattoo magazines or studio walls, people were already leaving marks behind.
Across caves and rock shelters around the world we find handprints, animals, hunters, spirals, dots, geometric marks and strange symbols that still make us stop and wonder thousands of years later. Some may have recorded hunts, beliefs, journeys, rituals or stories. Others may have carried meanings that have simply been lost to time.
That history became the inspiration for this new tattoo flash sheet.
I wanted these pieces to feel primitive, imperfect and human — the sort of marks that could work as individual tattoos, scattered fillers, or eventually build into an entire prehistoric sleeve. Mammoths, bison, deer, hunters, hands and abstract symbols can all be combined almost like fragments of an ancient wall transferred onto skin.
And there’s another idea I’ve always found fascinating…
What if some caves were more than places where people painted?
We know tattooing itself stretches back thousands of years, and pigment, ritual, body decoration and symbolic marking have existed across many ancient cultures. So I sometimes wonder whether certain caves or shelters might also have been gathering places where people decorated one another — perhaps even places where early forms of tattooing, scarification or ceremonial body marking were practised.
There’s no evidence that lets us simply call them “prehistoric tattoo studios,” so that part is speculation.
But imagine it.
Firelight flickering against painted animals. Pigments being ground from charcoal and ochre. Stories being passed from one generation to another. A symbol painted onto the cave wall… and perhaps another version of that same symbol being permanently carried on somebody’s skin.
Maybe the first flash sheets weren’t sheets at all.
Maybe they were cave walls.
That thought alone makes these designs incredibly interesting to me as a tattoo artist.
Every mark on this sheet can stand alone, but together they could become something much bigger — a full arm or leg sleeve that looks as though an ancient painted wall has been broken apart and rebuilt across the body.
If you were creating a prehistoric sleeve, what would you choose as the centrepiece — the mammoth, the bison, the handprint, the hunter… or one of the unexplained symbols?
