Neo-traditional flash design of a woman with a tall beehive hairstyle, red lips, two hearts and a banner scroll at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up woman with beehive hair and banner

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a stylised woman in profile-turned-front view, with a tall beehive hairstyle, red lips, a red drop earring and a beauty mark. Bold black outlines and grey shading define the hair, while pink and red blush, yellow skin tones and green eyes add colour. Two small pink hearts sit on her shoulder, and a red-outlined scroll banner with lettering runs across the bottom of the composition on a cream background.

Neo-trad Woman Portrait Banner Heart Earring Lip Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dougie Marsh had painted fourteen fairground banners in his life, and he could tell a wet scroll from a dry one by the sound it made under the brush. This one, for Madame Oriel's booth on the Harvest Green at Wickham, had to be right by Friday. The old boards had split in the rain, and she wanted the words across the bottom in red, outlined twice, so they could be read from the dodgems.

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She stood at his trestle with a tin of tea and watched him letter. "Something true," she said. "Not the usual rubbish about hearts." He painted the line he had been turning over all week, the one the lads on the waltzer sang when they lost their wages on the coconut shy. Madame Oriel gave a short bark of a laugh and said the customers would pay good money to hear it said plainly.

By Thursday night the fair had emptied. Dougie stayed late, the generator humming, the lamp making a cone of gold on the cream canvas. One curl of the lettering had run where he pressed too hard, and he thought about leaving it. Instead he took a fine sable and went back over the loop until the red sat clean again, because a thing done halfway was just a kind of lie.

On Friday the banner went up above the booth. Madame Oriel read it from the step with her hands on her hips, then looked at the wheel turning slowly against the dusk. "People will think I'm warning them," she said. "I'm not. I'm telling them the odds." Dougie packed his tins. Behind him the first punters were already laughing at the words, and paying their pound anyway.