Tattoo flash used to populate the walls of every tattoo studio, you'd be lucky to find an empty wall in a tattoo studio. Sheets upon sheets, with numbers or letters next to the images referring to a price sheet, or maybe the price right next to the design. You shopped to your budget.
I started my career in tattooing working from flash sheets, we had folders upon folders of the stuff in all different styles. As tattooing has progressed tattoo flash had kind of taken a back seat. Designs are more tailored for the individual, each client wanting their own piece of art.
That's not to say flash wasn't good for tattooing. In the days when the internet was a twinkle in someones eye and mobile devices were the things of Star Trek it wasn't easy to research new designs or find reference unless you went down to the library of had an extensive library of your own.
Flash was a way of bringing ideas to clients and in some cases keeping a tattooer withing their limits of tattooing, a tattooist wouldn't put up flash they weren't capable of doing (well they shouldn't have) and after tattooing popular designs in a flash sheet a number of times you'd have perfected the design. We had a lower back piece tribal with a colorful butterfly in our flash sheets that I probably tattooed at least once a day at one point. After awhile you'd start using different colours or change the tribal a little to mix things up and keep things interesting, it almost paved the way for progression and drawing your own designs just to curb the monotony, at the same time those without drive were happy to just copy it over and over.
When tattooing was in it's infancy not all tattooers were coming from an art background, they approached it as more of a trade. In the West tattooists would see a design on someone that they'd never seen before, maybe it was done in another country or another part of the continent and they'd trace it off the person and redraw it. That way we started to see similarities in designs across the country but with their own little spin on it, an archaic form of the internet where you'd trace a design off a client or see it and try an replicate it. Today it's so easy to print something off the internet or photocopy an illustration off it but flash came from the people.
You saw quite a few religious based designs, one of the reasons being there was religious reference to copy it from, JC and the Mother Mary were big hits, they still are. I imagine being a soldier at war in a foreign land was pretty scary and having a religious tattoo in some way felt like a protection symbol.
Pinups were pretty big back then, you see them in flash from all over the world. One of the reasons being soldiers would take photographs of their loved ones to tattooers in the places they were stationed and limited by their skills they'd redraw and simplify the photo, the pinup was born. If you've never seen some Sailor Jerry flash, you haven't had enough exposure to tattooing.
Tattoo flash exposed tattooer and clients to new ideas, it was our form of the internet back then and meant you weren't only limited to the creativity of the tattooer or studio you went too (you were lucky to have one tattoo studio in a town back then), you benefited from the flash they had collected.
Although it's frowned up in some studios to get something off the wall, if it was intended to be flash I say more power to you, some of the old school traditional flash has a real charm to it and I don't care if 1000 people have the same design, it's the nostalgia and beauty of that era of tattooing that makes the flash design worth having.
Peace Out