Colour traditional pin-up tattoo on an upper arm showing a woman in a pink apron holding a tray of cupcakes, with red script reading I should be in the kitchen.

Pin-up with cupcakes and kitchen script

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pin-up woman in a pink apron holds a tray of cupcakes, with a stove and a pale green backdrop behind her. Bold black outlines and smooth colour shading give the figure a classic, painted look. Red script with a cloud-like background runs down the arm beside her, and the photo is taken straight on to the tattoo.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Pin-up Cupcake Script Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley of the Marigold Vane had been cold for nine days, ever since the flour went to weevils and the oven door dropped off its hinges somewhere off the Cape Verdes. Eustace Platt, cook, sat on an upturned bucket peeling potatoes with the air of a man who had been handed the work of a sailmaker's widow, and the watch below came down each night to ask him when there would be bread.

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It was Dilys Crane, the bosun's mate, who solved it. She had a pot of leftover lead white and a brush worn down to a stub, and one wet afternoon she painted a woman on the bulkhead behind the stove. The woman wore a pink apron frilled at the hem and held a tray of cupcakes high, the way Eustace's mother had carried them to the harvest suppers in Bideford. Dilys gave her a wink and a cap set at a jaunty angle. Above the stove she daubed grey clouds, and across them, in red, she lettered the words she thought the cook most needed to hear: I should be in the kitchen.

Eustace read them twice and said nothing. The next morning there was a tin of condensed milk open on the bench and a smell of scorched sugar coming up the hatch, and by Thursday the men were lining up before the watch bell for something warm.

The Marigold Vane docked at Avonmouth three weeks later. The stevedores scrubbed the galley for the surveyor, and the bulkhead came up clean. But Eustace, sweeping out the last crumbs, found that the pink of the apron had sunk into the grain of the wood, and when the light came through the porthole at a low angle you could still see the tray, the cupcakes and the woman's wink.