Traditional flash drawing of a pin-up woman resting her arms on the rim of a foaming beer mug, with a green and red fish tail below, in bold colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up leaning over a beer mug

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A traditional-style flash design shows a dark-haired pin-up woman with rosy cheeks resting her arms on the rim of a tall beer mug. Below her, a green fish or tail shape with red spots curls through the amber beer, and white foam spills over the top. Heavy black outlines are filled with flat orange, green and red, on a pale background with parts of other flash designs visible at the edges.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Fish Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jukebox at the Sidewinder had been dead since April, so when the heat rolled off the Mojave that August, Ruth Calloway and I drank in silence and watched the highway wobble like something on a griddle. Ruth ordered the same thing every evening: a pint of Dunmore's bitter in a glass so cold it wept down the side. She said foam was the only honest part of beer, all that air pretending to be something.

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I was hauling fence posts to a ranch past Needles, three days late and running on petrol fumes and nerve. The bar belonged to Ruth's nephew, Danny, who liked to tell anyone who would listen that his grandmother had swum the reservoir below Oatman in 1952 and come back with a tail. Nobody believed him, least of all the grandmother, who said she had only been drunk and very lucky. Ruth laughed at that story every time. Then one night she didn't.

"Look at the glass," she said. I looked. Under the foam, in the amber, something turned over slow and heavy, a flick of green with red spots like coins at the bottom of a fountain. The barman was wiping a tap and didn't see it. Ruth folded her arms on the rim of the bar as if she owned the place, rested her chin on her wrist, and watched the shape circle the glass the way a dog circles before lying down.

"Your round," she said, "and don't drink the last inch." I paid. I left the last inch. When I came back through three weeks later the glass was gone and the bar smelled of wet sand, and Danny told me Ruth had gone east with a prospector and a bucket of ice.