Coloured illustration of a crouching pin-up woman with a large afro, red underwear and red heels, with green vine and ankh tattoos on her back and leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up with afro and ankh tattoo

Back · Colour · Flash

A full-length coloured drawing of a woman with a large afro, crouching sideways in red underwear and red high heels against a plain cream background. Her back and leg are marked with green vine tattoos and a red ankh, drawn with dark outlines and soft shading on the skin. The composition is centred with the figure filling most of the frame.

Back Calf Woman Pin-up Ankh Vine High heel

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the ankh by touch before you learn its name. On Tessaly Ring, where the water recyclers hum through every wall, the old drydock crews scratched it into bulkheads with welding picks, a loop balanced on a cross, and nobody could tell you what it meant. Your aunt Oyelaran called it the key that opens the air. She said it flatly, the way she said most things, while she pressed a cold thumb to your collarbone to check the ink was still wet.

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Years later you are the one with the inking kit in a crate beneath the hydroponics deck, because the medics have run out of sealant and the only thing left that holds a seam is ink pressed from carbon and algae. Customers climb up from the spokes. A dockhand wants vines up her forearm, green as the lettuce that keeps the ring fed. A pilot wants a single red loop for the day her ship came home. You sketch them on thin film first, the way your aunt taught you, and you never mention that the vines were the first thing she ever drew on you.

The night the lights failed in sector four, the ring went quiet except for the pumps. A girl from the nursery came down the ladder asking whether the key still worked. You did not know. You only knew the drawing. So you sat her on the stool under the one working lamp and pricked the red line into her ankle slowly, counting breaths, while the pumps kept time and the air stayed sweet.

At dawn the lights came back. She looked at the loop, then at you, and said it was only a drawing. You agreed that it was. You just never knew a drawing could be brave enough to hold a needle when nobody else would.