Black and grey realism tattoo of a pin-up woman in stockings and heels, lying on the side of a ribcage.

Pin-up woman in stockings on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A reclining pin-up woman in a frilly slip and bow, with her legs raised in stockings, garters and high heels. The shading is soft and smooth, with detailed hair and fabric folds rendered in greys and black. The figure runs diagonally across the side of the ribs against a plain skin background.

Realism Ribs Pin-up Woman High heel Garter Bow Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Vera Dunne wanted the girl's legs up in the air, heels pointing at the lamps, and she wanted the stockings black enough to stop a man in his tracks from the far side of the midway. I told her a pin-up needed a bit of room to breathe. She told me a pin-up needed to sell coconuts, and that I could make the rest of her as shy as I liked provided the seams were straight.

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I worked on the canvas behind the coconut shy for nine days, sleeping in the lorry with turpentine on my cuffs. Grey wash first, then the frilled slip, the bow at her shoulder, the curls spilling over the sawdust-coloured ground. Each evening the generator coughed, the bulbs warmed and the girl seemed to look back at me differently, as if she had decided something about my work. The men on the Waltzer came over to watch and said nothing. Old Pritchard, who ran the Cakewalk, brought me tea in a jam jar and asked whether I was going to paint myself in the corner too.

The turn came on the Sunday we pulled out of Weston. Vera had paid the men, not me, and when I asked for my wages she handed over an envelope with a receipt for the paint. I rolled the canvas tight and slid it under the tarpaulin with the heels still lifted. Two towns on, in a lay-by outside Taunton, I unrolled it to check the seams and found the last stocking had dried a shade darker than I meant it to, black as a wet road. I left it. It seemed right that one leg should be finished in a hurry, the way everything on the road is.