Pin-up woman tattoo in red and grey shading on the side of the ribs, with a small star tattoo on the hip above a studded belt.

Pin-up woman in red on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A pin-up woman in a red outfit and dark heels, with her hair in a bow, is tattooed along the side of the ribs. The figure has soft grey shading and clean outlines, with the red clothing as the main colour. A small black star sits lower on the hip, and the subject is shown in a casual, close-up photo with the head cropped out.

Traditional Ribs Pin-up Woman Star

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

Now sit still, the pair of you, and let the fire do its work, because this is the part about Nell Haddow and the red dress, and I'll not tell it twice. Her father worked the Deepwater seam with my own grandfather, and when the pit owners put up the Miners' Institute with its sprung floor and its tin ceiling, Nell was the first girl in Sallow Dene to dance on it.

Keep reading

She had a red frock she'd sewn herself from a bolt of cloth off the Co-op van, cut low enough to set the deacon's wife muttering, and a black bow she tied in her hair with a pin she'd nicked from her mother's dresser. Every Saturday she'd stand by the door with one hand on her hip and the other holding up a ticket, the way a woman holds a card she knows will win, and she'd say to the lads coming up from the cage, "Show me your wages first, and I'll show you the step."

Nobody in the Dene had money like that, but Tom Calloway, who was on the night shift and swore he'd never once been late for it, saved six weeks of tallies to buy a pair of heels from the travelling man. He carried them up the hill in a sack. Nell laughed so hard she had to sit on the stairs, then she took the heels, and she danced him round that hall until the stove went out.

The seam flooded in the spring of 1953. They got Tom out on the third day, grey as slate but breathing. Nell kept the red frock folded in tissue at the bottom of her chest, and the heels stood by the door as though she might still need them. Some nights, when the wind comes down off the tip, I swear you can hear those heels on the boards of the Institute, tap, tap, tap, keeping time for men who had no business dancing at all.