Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a dark-haired woman in a blue headscarf wearing red boxing gloves, with the words PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE STRUGGLE in black lettering.

Boxer pin-up with slogan on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a dark-haired woman in a blue headscarf, wearing large red boxing gloves, with bold black outlines and flat fills. The black lettering above and below her reads PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE STRUGGLE, set in a block layout around the figure. The image shows two close photographs of the same piece on a bare arm, with bright red and blue as the main colours.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Headscarf Slogan Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gloves had been sewn for a bout that never happened, and Nell Varley was still picking stitches out of the left thumb at half past nine when the knock came on the back door of the Halden Street gym. It was Tom Oakes, still grey with dust from the Ferris Mill, three lads behind him with placards rolled under their arms. "They want somebody on the cart for Saturday," he said. "Someone who looks like they could knock the foreman flat."

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Nell laughed at him, then looked down at the red leather in her lap. Her father had turned bricklayers into boxers for thirty years and never once let a strike near the ring. Still, the banner for the rally already showed a dark-haired woman in a blue headscarf, red gloves up, jaw set, with the words PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE STRUGGLE stacked around her in black block letters. The sign painter had given her Nell's eyebrows without asking.

On Saturday the cart rolled out past the mill gates with the wind coming off the canal, and Nell stood on the boards in the headscarf she wore for the boiler room, both gloves laced tight. The crowd went quiet. She threw one slow jab at the air, then another, and the foreman's son, watching from the office window, decided it was not worth coming down.

Afterwards she unlaced the gloves and dropped them into Tom's hands. "They're the mill's now," she said. She walked home with her bare fists in her coat pockets, the smell of red dye still on her fingers.