Traditional style colour tattoo of a woman in a pirate tricorn hat with a skull and crossbones, shown on the upper arm.

Pirate woman with skull hat on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman wearing a black tricorn hat with gold trim and a skull and crossbones emblem is shown in bold black outline. The face and flowing grey-shaded hair are shaded with soft gradients, while red lips, rosy cheeks and a red and gold collar add strong colour. The design is centred on the upper arm and fills most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair had been on Parkfield Common since Tuesday, and by Friday the paint on Mab's banner had cracked across the hat. Nobody else would touch her. My grandfather painted her the year the Wibberley brothers bought the big wheel: a black tricorn, gold braid, a skull at the front no bigger than a shilling. Every season since, he'd stood on an upturned crate to touch her up. Now his hands shook too much for a brush, so the job was mine.

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I worked on her at dusk, when the generators coughed into life and the candyfloss smell hung low over the caravans. The gold had to go on thin or it sat in lumps. I gave her a fresh red collar, and a touch of rouge on each cheek, because the old pigment had faded to a sickly pink. Dad came past with a tray of tea and said she looked like she'd been out all night. I told him that was the point of a pirate.

On the last night a lad in a torn jumper came to the shooting gallery and staked his whole week's wages on the rifle. He missed every tin. When he turned to go, his eye caught Mab, and he said she looked as if she knew where the treasure was buried. I didn't answer. Later, I found a scrap of paper pushed under the canvas flap: a rough map of the Common with a cross marked beside the ghost train.

In the morning the lot was loaded onto lorries for Dunstable and the banner rolled tight. I dug at the cross with a borrowed spade before we left and found only a rusted tin of pennies. I kept one. Every new season I hang Mab up again, the gold catching the lamps, and the tin rattles in my apron pocket like a promise nobody ever wrote down.

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