Traditional flash drawing of a pin-up woman raising red boxing gloves, with leaves, a flower and SELF MADE banners.

Pin-up boxer with SELF MADE banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A pin-up woman with dark wavy hair raises both arms, each wearing a red boxing glove, above a white top and red shorts with a yellow waistband. Bold black outlines, flat fills and warm red, green and yellow ink sit on a cream background. Leaves and a red flower frame the figure, and two banners read SELF MADE.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Banner Leaves Flower Star Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Mardle had ever painted a banner for a woman boxer, so when Mr Oakes sent to Leeds for a sign writer, the man arrived with a ladder, a tin of enamel and a price per letter. Oakes wanted her billed as the Mardle Mauler, Lady Exhibition, in letters a foot high. Nell wanted two words. The sign writer asked what they were. She didn't look up from the tape she was winding round her knuckles. "SELF MADE," she said, and he wrote it down as if it were a bill of sale.

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I was her cornerman for six years, which meant I knew where everything lived in that booth behind the Feathers: the bucket with the cracked lid, the bell that stuck on the third stroke, the bottle of witch hazel nobody admitted to drinking. On Saturdays the sawdust smelled of stout and wet coats. Men shouted things at her that I won't repeat, and she'd wait until they'd finished, then wave to them, which unsettled them more than a punch would have.

The night the coastal man came, he had a manager who talked louder than he did and a belt he'd won in a field somewhere. Before the bell, Nell lifted both gloves above her head and held them there, bored, as if she'd already counted the rounds and found them short. The crowd took it for showing off. I knew it was a promise.

She won in the fifth. Afterwards the sign writer came round to the booth with his ladder still on his shoulder to be paid. Nell counted out two shillings for two words, one coin at a time into his palm. "Which one was the hard one to spell?" he asked. "Neither," she said. "They were the cheap bit."