Three black line drawing flash designs on paper: a lipstick with a bow, a skull and crossbones with a spider web, and a heart containing a lipstick.

Lipstick and heart flash designs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

Three hand-drawn flash designs sit on a pale sheet. The top design shows a lipstick tube tied with a bow, the middle one shows a lipstick-shaped tube with a skull, crossbones and a spider web, and the lower design shows a heart framing a lipstick with the word BITCH on its band, surrounded by small sparkles and an arrow. All are drawn in bold black outlines with light hatching and no colour.

Traditional Lipstick Bow Skull Crossbones Spider web Heart Sparkle Arrow Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hilda Crane had kept the cosmetics counter at Pickard's on Briggate for nineteen years, and in all that time nobody had asked her for the red called Dynamite. They asked for Cherry Rose and Coral Dawn, for the stuff in the gold case with the ribbon. So when the thin young man from the Ministry came in one wet Tuesday with a grey envelope and asked for Dynamite by name, she set down her cloth and reached under the counter without a word.

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The tubes were plain brass, the same as the ones the girls filled out past the gasworks, but someone had painted a skull and crossbones on each cap in white enamel, and a spider's web across the top like frost on a gate. Nobody had explained the drawings. The young man said the night shift had a bet going, and the foreman could not tell a shine on the fingers from a shine on the lips, so the stuff had better look like lipstick or the girls would lose their wages.

Hilda sold forty that week. She wrapped each one in tissue and tied a bow of green ribbon around it, because that was how Pickard's did things. The women came back for a second, then a third, and they leaned across the glass to tell her it was the only thing in Leeds that didn't taste of tin. One girl bought two and said her sister in Armley wanted one for her wedding, and Hilda gave her a bow for free.

On the Friday the young man came back for the last one. She had kept it behind the till, its web gone a little scuffed from handling. She told him the Dynamite had gone off in the damp, which was a lie, and then she pressed a Coral Dawn into his palm instead, tied with a bow, and charged him full price for the ribbon.