Traditional style tattoo of a pin-up woman in a red and white striped swimsuit diving past bubbles and a clam shell with a pearl, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up swimmer and clam shell on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A diving pin-up woman in a red and white striped swimsuit with dark hair streaming behind her is shown upside down, surrounded by small outlined bubbles. Bold black outlines and flat red, pink and grey fills give the design a classic traditional look, and a clam shell with a pearl sits at the bottom of the composition. The image is a side-by-side pair of photographs of the same forearm tattoo, with even lighting and the design filling most of each frame.

Traditional Forearm Pin-up Bubble Pearl Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Vera Pallister had been the Marine Lido's diving girl for six summers, and the crowd on the north pier still paid a shilling to watch her go off the high board in her striped costume, arms straight, knees never bending. Her manager, Mr Dunphy, said the trick was to look surprised by the water every time.

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That August a letter arrived at the box office addressed only to 'the girl who goes under.' Inside was a pressed oyster shell and a note in pencil: the clam beds off Scarrow Point had been closed since spring, and whoever dived there would find what the fishermen had been hiding. Vera read it twice on the bench behind the kiosk, then folded it into her sleeve.

She went out at slack tide with a borrowed rope and a torch wrapped in oilcloth. The water was green and cold and full of sand that rose around her hands like smoke. Bubbles climbed past her face in strings, each one a small silver argument with the surface. Down among the ribbed shells she found a clam propped open on a rock, and in its grey throat, a pearl the size of a bantam's egg, pale as the moon over the pier.

She didn't take it. She sat with it in her palm until her lungs began to ache, then pressed it back into the shell and kicked upward, head first, toes pointed at the sky. On the board the next afternoon she dived for the crowd as always, and when Mr Dunphy asked where she'd been, she only smiled and said the sea kept its own accounts.