Large black and grey traditional back tattoo of a pin-up style woman in a feathered headdress holding a staff and shield, surrounded by roses and flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered pin-up and roses across a back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a pin-up style woman wearing a feathered headdress, holding a feathered staff and a round shield, with a rose and star-like flowers filling the surrounding space. The linework is bold and solid, with flat black fills and grey shading in the rose petals and shield. The composition is symmetrical across the spine, with the central figure framed by leaves, roses and floral elements.

Traditional Back Woman Pin-up Headdress Feather Staff Shield Rose Flower Star Leaves

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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

Mrs Gorse keeps the boarding house on Marine Road the way she keeps her accounts, in pencil, with the tally of the summer's takings chalked on the back of the scullery door. You have been lodging there three weeks when the fair packs up on the prom and the painted shooting-gallery figure is carted up the hill on a flatbed, wrapped in tarpaulin. She asks you to carry the shield in, because her knee is bad and the boy from the fair has gone home to Preston.

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The shield is heavier than it looks, a round board with a bull's eye worn down to the grain. Out in the yard, her nephew Dennis has a pot of black gloss and a tin of rose-pink paint he swears came off a lifeboat. The rain has bled the petals and lifted the varnish from the feathers, and he means to put them right before the figure goes into the damp cellar until spring. You hold the storm lamp while he works. He tells you the old showman used to say she was the best shot on the front, that a penny a go kept half the town's children in sherbet, and that nobody ever once knocked her over.

When the paint is dry, Dennis hands you the air rifle and says you may have a go before she goes under the tarpaulin. You sight along the barrel at the star-shaped flower on the shield, the one she holds like a promise, and you pull the trigger. The pellet clinks off the board and drops into the gutter. Dennis laughs and says that is the whole trick of her, she only ever stays standing for people who have stopped needing her to. Behind the yard wall the tide is coming in over the sand, and the lamp gutters, and you find you are still smiling at her painted face in the dark.