Traditional colour tattoos of a pin-up woman on the forearm and a rose on the upper arm of a woman in a black patchwork-print t-shirt.

Pin-up and rose tattoos on arms

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a black short-sleeved patchwork-print t-shirt shows tattoos on both arms, with her face cropped out of the frame. On one forearm a pin-up woman's head is drawn with bold black outlines and shaded skin, and on the upper arm of the other arm a red rose sits among green leaves. The bright red, green, yellow and blue ink dominates the arms against the black and grey clothing and grey jeans.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Pin-up Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pin-up on the side of Harrow's rifle booth had been painted over three times, and each time she came back with her hair a shade darker and her mouth a shade redder. Nell Harrow swore she had watched the fourth coat dry and seen the woman blink. Nobody at Stillwater Fair argued with Nell about paint. They moved the booth to the far end of the field, where the wind came off the marsh and the gulls would not land.

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The rose was older. It lived on the canvas flap of the strongman's wagon, sunk among green leaves, and it had come from a flash sheet Nell's grandmother bought off a sailor in Hull for three shillings and a bottle of gin. Every winter the petals were retouched with a needle dipped in red thread, because the old women said a rose left unfinished goes looking for its colour. Nobody in the family ever asked whose thread it was.

In March they crossed the county line at Dunmere toll bridge, and the keeper, a thin man with a ledger, asked what the wagons carried. Nell said pins and paint and a patchwork coat. He wanted to see the coat. It was black, patched in teal and mustard and grey, and stitched into the back of it was the painted woman with her red mouth, and beside her the rose, both freshly finished in thread.

The keeper ran his thumb across the stitches and found the rose still damp with dew. "Fair's not till May," he said. Nell said that was the point. He waved them through without writing anything down. When she looked back from the road, the coat was hanging from the bridge rail with the red rose facing the marsh, and the woman beside it had her eyes open.