Traditional colour tattoo of a pin-up sailor in an oval rope frame with a ship's wheel and daisies, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up sailor and ship's wheel on a back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with dark curled hair and a pink bow, wearing a striped top, sits within an oval green frame bordered by rope. A red and brown ship's wheel sits below her, flanked by white daisies with yellow centres. The bold outlines and flat, saturated colour are typical of traditional American tattooing, shown across the upper back with a partly visible tattoo on the arm at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora had the ship's wheel balanced on one shoulder when the rain started, and the lane up from the harbour turned to grease under her boots. Nobody else in Porthowan would touch it. Mr Tregear had said the brass was worth more than the boat, and the boat had been worth nothing since the March gale took its mast.

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In the workshop she laid the wheel across two trestles and rubbed the spokes with a rag until the rust gave way to red. Her father had painted a girl on the bow of every boat he ever owned, always the same girl, dark curls pinned high and a pink bow at the throat, because her mother had looked exactly like that at a fair in Falmouth the summer before the war. Dora kept his paint tins in the order he had left them. The daisies came next, white petals with yellow middles, dabbed on with the flat end of a brush because he said a daisy should look like it had been picked in a hurry.

Tregear came back on Thursday wanting the wheel restored for the regatta, and a girl on the panel behind it, sailor's stripes and all. He wanted the face made modern, he said, the way the magazines did it. Dora told him she would do it for cash and that the face would stay as it was. He grumbled, counted out the notes on her bench, and went off whistling something from the wireless.

She painted until the lamps came on along the quay. When she finally stood back, the girl sat in her oval frame with one hand on the spokes, steering nowhere, the pink bow bright as a boat's flag in the dusk. Dora rinsed her brushes, switched off the light, and left the door open so the smell of the sea could come in and sit with her.

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