Traditional-style pin-up flash drawing of a woman with a cross, the words FAITH and HOPE, and a chequered neck design, painted on a board.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up face with FAITH and HOPE tattoos

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A stylised illustration of a woman with a tall pompadour, red cheek blush and blue eyeshadow, shown as a tattoo design on a painted board. Bold black outlines and flat fills sit alongside a cross, a lightning bolt, a cross earring and chequered patterns, with the words FAITH and HOPE across the head. The palette is mostly cream and black with touches of red and blue, set against a dark red fabric background.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Faith Hope Cross Lightning bolt Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board had to be finished by Saturday or Vic would sell it to the Dreamland man for a shilling and a pie, so I worked through the Thursday night with the arc lamp hissing over my shoulder. Cream ground first, two coats, the way my father taught me before he gave up the brushes for the bookies. The black came last, and it was the hard part, because a line that wobbles across a pin-up's cheekbone looks exactly like a line that wobbles across a drunk's face.

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Mavis Quinn had sat for me on Tuesday with her hair piled into a pompadour as tall as a lighthouse. She wanted it stiff and glossy, a wave about to break over the pier. She wanted FAITH written above one brow and HOPE above the other, with a little black cross between them, because her mother had told her those were the two things a girl could keep in her purse when everything else was spent. I gave her a lightning bolt snaking down the side of the face, a chequered shirt buttoned to the collar, and a cross for an earring that swung whenever she laughed, which was often.

On Friday morning I laid on the red blush, two round coins on the cheeks, and the blue shadow over the lids, then stood back and waited for the paint to tell me whether I had got her right. Vic came in at eleven smelling of kippers and asked where the board was. I said it was done. He said Mavis had left word at the stall that she was taking the Brighton train and wouldn't be needing it after all, so he could have it for the pie.

I looked at the painted face for a long time. It had its chin tipped up, the way Mavis held it when she was about to tell a lie she half believed. I hung it on the back wall of the booth anyway, beside my father's old brushes, and left the lamp on so the cross earring caught the light whenever the door opened.