Full-colour tattoo of a red-haired cartoon pin-up in a red dress and blue gloves, holding a microphone, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon pin-up with microphone on calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon woman with long red hair wears a fitted red dress with a thigh-high slit and long blue gloves, and stands beside a silver microphone on a stand. The outlines are bold and the shading is smooth, with white sparkle highlights on the red dress. The tattoo wraps down the calf against a checkered floor in the background.

Calf Pin-up Microphone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Doyle had been up a stepladder since first light, and the bulb over the stage at the Lantern had blown twice that week, so he worked by the front window instead. Mr Pask, the landlord, wanted a poster of Dolly Vane in the glass before the mill men came in on Saturday. Dolly had sung at the Lantern for six years, and nobody in Coldharbour Market had ever seen her face on paper, only the back of her head under the bar lamp.

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Frank had never painted a woman who could sing. He did it the way he did everything, with bold black edges and flat colour, and then he took his finest brush and dotted the sequins of the red gown with little crosses of white, one at a time, until the dress seemed to hold a fistful of street lamps. Dolly came in at four to check on him, still in her headscarf, and stood in front of the glass a long time without speaking.

"You've made me taller," she said at last.

"I've made you look like you're about to tell someone something they won't like," Frank said. She laughed, took the cigarette from her mouth, and asked him to move the microphone to the left, because that was where she always stood, and to make the gloves longer, the way her mother had worn them to the chapel dance in 1931.

On Saturday the poster caught the lamps outside the Lantern, and the sparkles flashed on the wet pavement whenever a van went past. Frank stood across the road with his hands in his pockets, watching the red glow in the window, and when the first notes drifted out through the door he turned for home without going in.