Outline tattoo of a pin-up woman with a pearl necklace, lotus flowers and a Bayou Beauty banner, placed on the upper arm.

Pin-up woman with lotus and banner on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo on the upper arm shows a pin-up style woman with curled hair, a pearl necklace and a flowing scroll design around her. Lotus flowers and a banner reading BAYOU BEAUTY fill the lower part of the design. The work is shown as fine black or grey outline only, with no visible shading or colour, on a warm brown skin tone.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Pin-up Woman Lotus Banner Scrollwork Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Lucien wanted the banner done first, before the lotus or the pearls, because he said a bayou girl needs her name across her before anything else gets a look in. I told him the name was too long for the scroll, and he told me to make the letters smaller, which is how most arguments with Lucien ended, with me making things smaller.

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His boat was the Marguerite, a flat-bottomed skiff with a cracked oar and a bilge that smelled of crawfish and bad coffee. Every Saturday he rowed me out past the cypress knees to the pond where the lotus grew thick as cabbages, and I sat with my pencil and sketchbook while he fished for nothing in particular. He said the flowers opened at dawn and shut by noon, so you had to draw them fast or not at all. I learned to draw them fast.

The woman was his idea too, though he never could say who she was. A dance hall singer from Lafayette, he thought, or a girl who sold him bait and laughed too loud. I gave her Marcel curls and a string of pearls copied from my aunt's jewellery box, and by the third week she looked more real to me than the unpaid bills stacked on the shop counter.

The morning I took the sketch out to the pond, the lotus had already closed. Lucien was gone, the Marguerite drifting loose against the reeds with her oar lying across the thwart. I pinned the drawing to the mooring post and left the banner blank, because some names are only true while someone is there to say them.