Colour traditional tattoo of a pink lipstick with a flower in its base and black sparkles, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lipstick with sparkles on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A traditional-style lipstick tattoo with a pink tip, gold collar and a pink flower in the base, outlined in bold black linework. Four-pointed sparkles and small dots surround it on pale skin, and grey and teal tattoos sit at the edges of the frame. The photo is taken close up against a blurred white and glass background.

Traditional Forearm Lipstick Sparkle Flower Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tamsin Pardoe kept her lipstick in a tin no bigger than a shilling, and nobody in Harrowgate Row had ever seen her put it on. She carried it to the pit gate every Monday morning anyway, when the cage was lowering the first shift and the lamps went down in a long bright string, one after another, into the dark.

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The men said the tin was a charm. A young haulier named Joseph Ruddle, who had come over from the Welsh side with a cough and no money, asked her what it was for. She told him the pit had taken three of her brothers and a husband, and that a woman who stayed above ground with nothing pretty to hold got lonely while the lamps were under. So she gave him the stick to turn in his fingers. It was pink as a foxglove and smelt of wax and roses, and when he twisted the base, a small pink flower showed through the glass.

The roof came in at the Low Seam in the spring. Joseph was on the wrong side of the fall with two others, and the rescue men tapped the rock for a day and a night and heard nothing back. On the second morning Tamsin walked to the gate with her tin, knelt in the wet dust and drew the pink stick along the stone where the candles had last been seen. It left a mark that held the lamplight. The men dug towards it and found all three, their lamps still burning in their hands.

After that the village said the lipstick could find a man in the dark, and Tamsin never once corrected them. Joseph wore the tin on a string round his neck until he was an old man, and on Mondays he still stood at the gate while the lamps went down, counting the bright points as they dropped out of sight.