Colour traditional-style pin-up tattoo of a dark-haired woman in a red dress and high heels, draped in an American flag, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up woman with American flag on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A seated pin-up woman with long dark curly hair and a flower tucked behind one ear is shown looking over her shoulder. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading define the figure, with red, blue, white and yellow ink used throughout. She wears a red dress and black heels, and a striped and starred American flag wraps around her hips and legs against the side of the torso.

Traditional Ribs Pin-up Woman Flower American flag High heel Curly hair Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The foreman wanted the lady finished before the tide turned, so Tobias Wren climbed the staging with his brushes in his teeth and a tin of vermilion under one arm. The Marigold Jean had sat in the drydock at Penhallow for a month, and every fisherman on the quay had an opinion about what she should wear on her bow. Wren settled it his own way. He painted a woman with black hair spilling loose like weed in a current, a red frock, and a flag of stripes and stars knotted at her hip, the kind of flag that had come in on the American schooners the summer before.

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Old Maud at the chandlery said a painted woman would bring the boat bad luck. Wren told her luck was only paint left out in the weather long enough. He worked through the afternoon, shading the curve of her thigh and lifting one shoe so the heel caught the light. When he came down, a flower was still wet behind her ear, orange as a lamp. It was the only thing he had not planned.

The Jean sailed on the morning ebb with six men aboard and Wren's woman glaring back at the harbour wall. Three days later a squall came in off the western ground. Danny Pascoe, the skipper's son, swore afterwards that the bow had gone pale in the spray and then lifted, as the boat rose, as if she were turning to look at the sea. Nobody believed him until the Jean limped home on one engine, and the lady on her bow was the only paint still bright.

When the yard asked Wren to repaint her the next spring, he refused. She had done her work, he said, and a woman who had hauled six men out of the Atlantic deserved to keep her own colours.