Traditional style flash design of a pin-up woman with her arms behind her head, framed by red roses and a banner reading Veronica Lodge, on a blue background.

Pin-up with roses and name banner

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A pin-up woman with dark bobbed hair and a polka dot dress sits with her arms raised behind her head, framed by large red roses with green leaves. A ribbon banner across the lower half reads Veronica Lodge. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, blue, pink and skin tones sit on a plain blue background.

Traditional Pin-up Woman Rose Banner Lettering Polka dot

Find an artist for this

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

Nell Harrigan had been lettering the same ribbon for three hours when the rain started, and the sky over the Corn Exchange went the colour of wet ink. She worked on a pressed-tin hoarding above the market, her brushes standing in a jam jar, a tin of vermilion open by her boot. The client wanted the name in gold leaf, the letters swelling like a sash tied in a hurry. She had pencilled it on brown paper four times and rubbed it out four times.

Keep reading

Below her, the lamps on Briggate flickered on one by one. A dance-hall boy in a borrowed suit stopped to watch her work, then thought better of asking what the roses were for. Nell didn't blame him. The roses had come out of her own hand before she ever sketched a face for them: fat red blooms with green leaves curling round a spotted dress and a pair of raised arms. The client had paid double for the pin-up and would not say who she was meant to be.

Near midnight the rain eased. Nell laid the last stroke of black outline, tight and clean, and sat back on the crate to let it dry. The name sat in the middle of the ribbon, every letter sharp against the blue of the board. She thought about the man who had ordered it, how he'd stood in her doorway dripping and asked whether gold would hold up in the weather. She had told him gold would last longer than either of them.

She signed the corner with her initials, tiny as a stitch, and packed her brushes before the night watchman came round.