Black and grey realism tattoo of a pin-up woman in a billowing white dress on the side of the ribs, with a vintage car tattoo beside it.

Pin-up woman with billowing dress on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows a pin-up woman in a flared dress and high heels, mid-stride with one hand raised to her face. The dress and legs are built up with soft smooth shading and fine outlines, and the hair and face are finely modelled. A second tattoo of a vintage car sits to the right, and the whole design wraps along the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Pin-up Woman Dress High heel Hair Shading

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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

The wind comes round the funnel at four in the afternoon and takes the white dress straight off its hook, so you are the only one on the afterdeck to see it go up like a sail. Nobody else is watching. The passengers are below at the bingo, and the bosun is forward somewhere arguing with a crane. You grab for the hem and catch a fistful of cotton that smells of camphor and somebody else's scent.

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It belongs to Vera Dunmore, who sings in the second-class lounge and has been paying you in cigarettes to press her costumes since Southampton. She is in her cabin with a basin and a bottle of bicarbonate, too seasick to stand. The dress, she told you, is the one for the number about the wind off the harbour, the one the photographers always want, and she would sooner go over the rail herself than lose it.

You fold it over your arm and climb the ladder to the boat deck, where a grey two-seater lies lashed under its tarpaulin, shipped out from Coventry for the captain's wife. It is the one thing aboard nobody lets you touch. You lift a corner of the canvas and the chrome grille throws back your face, stretched and bent, like someone you half know from a photograph.

By the time you reach Vera's door the wind has dropped and the sea has gone flat as ironing. She opens it a crack, takes the dress without looking at you, and shuts the door again. Through the wood you hear her humming the number, one note at a time, as the ship turns for home.