Traditional style tattoos of a pin-up figure, a red rose and a skull on a woman's upper arm and forearm, with a black slogan tank top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up, rose and skull tattoos on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman wearing a black racerback tank top with white slogan text shows a sleeve of tattoos on her left arm, including a pin-up style figure and a red rose on the upper arm. A skull design sits lower on the forearm, close to the wrist. The linework is bold and dark, with solid areas of red, green and skin-toned shading, and the arm fills the left side of the frame against the plain dark top.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Pin-up Rose Skull Woman Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The snow closed the Hollin Pass on Tuesday and the mule train has not come through since, so I have had time to think about the red rose you pressed into my last letter. It arrived flat and brown at the edges, but I put it in the tin with my good stockings and it is still there. Mrs Pryce at the boarding house says I am soft. She is right about most things.

The man I wrote about, Tom Garrow, drove the string up from Castleford every fortnight with a skull inked on the back of his wrist, the old kind with a crooked grin, done by a sailor in Liverpool who charged him a shilling and a bottle. Tom said it was to remind him which bones were his. He used to lift that hand to the lamp while he talked, so the grin seemed to wink at me. I never asked what he meant by it, and he never said.

Last Thursday the wind took his hat off at the top of the switchbacks and he went after it on foot. The ice was thin there. They found the hat first, pinned under a stone on a ledge, and then they found him. The skull on his wrist was the only thing the cold had not made quiet. I went up with the men and did not cry until I got back to the stable and saw the mules still had their blankets on, because nobody had thought to take them off.

Tomorrow the road opens, they say. I am riding down with the first wagon to take the rose to the lake at Bell Crag, where Tom wanted his ashes scattered. You will think that foolish. Perhaps it is. But that grin was the only honest thing in the pass, and I mean to leave it something red to look at.

Yours, with love, Nell