Traditional style flash design of a pin-up woman with a headband, flanked by red roses and LOVE and LIFE banners, with a large red rose below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up with roses and LOVE LIFE banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A traditional style flash drawing of a dark-haired pin-up woman wearing a headband, with bold black outlines and flat fills. Two red roses with green leaves sit either side of her head, with banners reading LOVE and LIFE, and a large dark red rose sits at the base. The design is shown on a pale beige textured background with the colour ink dominating.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Rose Banner Love Life Headband Leaves

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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

Mae Corrigan had kept the lamp at Scarrow Head for eleven winters and had never once seen a woman come off the mail boat. So when the bundle of flash arrived wrapped in oilcloth, she unfolded it on the kitchen table and found, pinned to the top, a painted lady with a satin band in her hair, two red roses either side of her head, and a ribbon in each hand that read LOVE and LIFE.

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The tattooist's note was tucked in the corner, written in pencil on the back of a tide table. Sell what you can at the harbour, it said, and keep the sheet you like. Mae kept the lady. She pinned her above the stove, out of reach of the damp, and every evening when she climbed the iron stairs to light the lamp she glanced back through the window at that painted face and felt, absurdly, that someone was keeping watch with her.

In March the fog sat on the water for nine days. The horn groaned, the sea worked at the lower rocks, and on the ninth night a small fishing boat slid out of the murk with its engine dead, drifting toward the reef. Mae had no radio that worked and no one to send. She carried the lamp down to the landing and swung it in the slow, steady rhythm her father had taught her, and the men aboard shouted back through the grey, steering by the light until their keel grated on the shingle.

The youngest of them, a boy with salt-cracked hands, came up to the kitchen the next morning to thank her. He stopped dead at the painted lady above the stove and asked where she had come from. Mae told him it came with the post. He studied the ribbons for a long while and said his grandmother had worn the same roses across her shoulder the year she crossed the Channel. The following week he came back with a pencil and a tin of tea, and between them they pinned a second sheet beside the first, and the wall above the stove began, slowly, to fill.