Black and grey traditional pin-up tattoo of a woman bending forward in stockings and heels, covering most of the upper back.

Pin-up woman in stockings across a back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large pin-up woman fills most of the back, leaning forward with one arm raised and the other reaching down, wearing lingerie, a garter belt, polka-dot stockings and high heels. The linework is bold and shading is smooth and soft, built from black and grey tones with heavy shadows on the thigh and hair. Small pink wing shapes are visible at the bottom edge of the frame, and the bare skin of the back forms the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose. That's where Ada Pring went over in the winter of forty-seven, and she never forgave the boards or the harbour. Sit down, sit. You want the picture, don't you? Everyone who comes down the quay wants the picture before they want the chowder.

Keep reading

The woman on the Kestrel Lass was painted by a Londoner called Tobias Quill, who came to Hartsea with a tin of marine enamels and a debt he never named. The skippers hated her. The chapel men said she was a scandal on a working hull. Quill only shrugged and went on with his brush: stockings with dots on them, a garter pulled tight, heels like needles, and that long arm flung up towards the wheelhouse roof as if she was reaching for a rope nobody else could see. The lads named the boat after her, and then they named the lamp after her too.

Autumn of fifty-two, a grey wall of fog came off the Ledge with the sea still high underneath it. Walt Brennan had the helm, and his compass spun like a dropped coin. He said later he'd have sworn on his mother that they were heading for the Pinnacles. Then the wheelhouse lamp caught the painted arm, pointing steady over the bow, and he swung the wheel after it without thinking. Forty minutes later the Kestrel Lass nosed gently onto the sand inside the harbour wall, every man aboard alive.

Walt bought Quill a pint that night and asked why the arm pointed the way it did. Quill just wiped his brush and said she always knew the way home. Every spring the crew still gives her a fresh coat of black and grey, and every spring Walt's grandson climbs up the rail to check her arm is aimed at the harbour mouth. So if you're ever out past the Ledge and the fog comes down like wet wool, don't trust the needle. Find the girl with her arm up.

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