Two views of a colour neo-traditional pin-up tattoo on a lower leg, showing a woman in a red gingham apron dress holding a cherry cupcake and blowing a kiss.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up with cupcake on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pin-up woman with brown curled hair, a red gingham dress and white lace-trimmed apron, holding a pink-frosted cupcake with a cherry in one hand and blowing a kiss. Her arm carries pink flower tattoos, and she wears red ankle-strap heels. The bold outlines, smooth shading and rich reds, pinks and browns are shown in a left close-up and a right full-leg view.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign-writer had been paid in cakes, which Ted Harker said was the only honest wage a man could get in Scarborough that winter. He spent three evenings on the window of Pask's Confectionery painting a girl in a gingham frock, a pink-frosted cupcake balanced on her palm, and by the fourth morning the whole front of the shop had become a joke the town was happy to share. Mrs Pask stood on the pavement with her hands folded over her pinny and said the girl looked as if she was about to nick the last Eccles cake.

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Ted would not say who she was modelled on. He said she was made from every shop girl who had ever leaned across a counter to promise a sponge was fresh, and that was enough for the council man who came round asking about the lettering. What Ted did not mention was that the kiss was meant for Vera Lowe, who worked the Saturday teas and had never once looked up from the till when he came in.

Vera saw the sign from the number seven bus. Her cheeks went the same pink as the frosting, and she laughed so loudly the conductor asked if she was all right. When Ted came in that afternoon she was already reaching for a cherry bun, sliding it across the counter with two fingers, and she told him the girl in the window had a far better hand with a cake than she did.

The shop closed in the seventies and the windows were boarded in the nineties. Through a gap in the planks the sign still shows, the girl's lips still puckered, the cherry still red under forty years of grime. On wet afternoons a small boy stops on the pavement, presses his nose to the gap, and blows her a kiss back.

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