Small fine line black tattoo of a bobby pin on the forearm of a light skinned arm, set against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bobby pin on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single bobby pin is drawn in thin black linework, shown vertically in the centre of the frame. The pin has a rounded top and a slight wave along its two prongs, with minimal shading and no fill. The ink sits on pale skin against a dark background, and the tattoo is the only point of focus.

Fine line Forearm

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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

The band has reached the third number of the evening and the floor is already a crush of damp shoes and borrowed frocks. You have pins in your mouth because your hands are busy with the buttons of your gloves, and when Walter from the bakery swings you under his arm, the first of them skids off across the boards. You don't stop to look. Nobody stops for a hairpin in the Saltcote Pavilion, not in 1947, not with the Lindy going like a fire.

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Later, in the ladies' cloakroom, you find the second pin still holding the back of your hair and nothing else. Dorothy Vane, who has minded the cloakroom since before the war, keeps a biscuit tin on the shelf above her chair. Gloves go in it, a single earring, a tortoiseshell comb with two teeth missing. She turns the contents over with one finger until she reaches a bobby pin with its prongs crimped like a wave and its rounded head flattened from a heel. She holds it up to the bulb. "You'll want to come back for this one, love, or it ends up in here with the rest of us." She drops it back in the tin.

Walter asks you to dance again at the interval, and you say yes, and for two numbers you forget the tin entirely. Then the lights come up for the last waltz and the floor clears to the walls, and you watch him hunt the boards on his knees, patient as a man searching a cathedral for a dropped coin. He finds nothing. You know exactly where the pin is.

The following Saturday you walk in early and Dorothy is already lifting the lid. Under the gloves, under the comb, it lies where she left it. You take it, still a little warm from the bulb, and push it back into your hair before you step out into the rain.