Neo-traditional flash design of a pin-up woman in a yellow and navy bodysuit with a purple dragon behind her and HELLO KITTY banners across a rope-framed oval.

Pin-up dragon and banner flash design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured flash design showing a stylised pin-up woman with curled brown hair, wearing a yellow and navy bodysuit with a gold X emblem, posed in front of a purple dragon. Two scrolled banners reading HELLO KITTY sit across a rope-framed oval. Bold black outlines, soft shading and a warm tan background give it a classic tattoo look.

Neo-trad Traditional Pin-up Dragon Banner Rope frame Wing Superhero Woman Hello kitty

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry from Calais had been waved through four times before Owen Pryce pulled it into the inspection bay at Holyhead, and it was the fifth time that made me look properly. He had a sunburnt neck and a tin of mints he kept offering round like a bribe, and he swore the crate held nothing but sign-writers' boards. Forty stiff sheets of plywood, each painted by a dead man called Ambrose Lusk, who had worked the fairground booths at Southampton for fifty years.

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I lifted the top board. A pin-up stared back at me, all curled brown hair and a yellow and navy suit with a gold X at the waist, and rearing behind her was a purple dragon with wings spread like an umbrella caught in a gust. Two scrolls ran across the lower half, HELLO and KITTY, in the flaking gold leaf of a booth that no longer existed. "Nothing to declare," Pryce said. "Just pictures." The dragon's eye glowed the exact yellow of a warning lamp. I had been on that bay for eleven years, and I knew when a man was lying by omission.

Lusk's paperwork, when Pryce finally dug it out of a damp envelope, described the boards as decorative signage of no value. Tucked behind the last one was a letter in the same looping hand, addressed to a niece in Cork: keep the Kitty for the girls, the dragon for the boys who never listen. I read it twice, then aloud, and Pryce went red and then pale.

I stamped the manifest cleared. Then, because I am not a monster, I asked whether the niece had an address for the dragon. He didn't. So I took the last board home myself and hung it in our hall, where the dragon keeps watch over the door, and every morning it looks at me as though it knows precisely what I didn't declare.