Coloured pencil sketch of a cartoon pin-up character with pigtails, holding a mallet and a pistol, with a red heart on the thigh and playing card letters beneath, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon pin-up sketch with mallet and pistol

Mixed · Flash

A pencil sketch of a stylised cartoon woman with pigtail hair and heavy eye makeup, holding a large mallet over one shoulder and a pistol in the other hand. She wears a bikini-style outfit with a red heart shape on one thigh, and the letters Q, K and A appear in playing card style below her. The loose, overlapping linework is drawn in red and dark blue pencil with light shading, set on paper with no body part visible.

Cartoon character Pistol Heart Playing card Pin-up Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mallet had been Dolores's idea, which was how Nell knew the whole thing was doomed. Dolores had won it at the coconut shy on Marrowby Pier in 1987 and had never once set it down, not even to sit, so when Mr Pemberton came out of the back office of the amusements carrying the Saturday float in a carrier bag, it was Dolores who swung first and asked questions afterwards.

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Nell held the pistol. It was a silver water gun from the penny arcade, loaded with vinegar, and she aimed it at Mr Pemberton's left eyebrow with the seriousness of a woman who had practised in her bedroom mirror all week. 'Hands where I can see them, Pemberton,' she said. 'And don't look at the cards.' He looked at the cards. Three of them lay face up on the counter where she had dropped them on the way in: the Queen, the King and the Ace. It was the same trick she had played at every till on the south coast since Easter. Nobody had ever worked out why it was never the Jack.

Dolores tore the bag open on the counter. There was no money in it at all, only a ham sandwich, a Tupperware of trifle and a receipt for a fortnight's rent on the pier kiosk, paid in cash every month since 1979 by a woman called Nell's mother, whose name was printed in faded biro at the bottom.

Dolores licked the spoon, looked at the sandwich and said, 'Well, that's us told.' Nell put the Ace back in her pocket, and they walked out past the candyfloss machine with nothing at all, which was the first honest job either of them had ever done.