Traditional tattoo of a sailor pin-up girl in a white hat and red top, with an anchor and green laurel wreath, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailor pin-up with anchor and laurel on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A pin-up woman with short dark hair wears a white sailor hat and a red strapless top, with a small anchor on her shoulder beside her. She is framed by a dotted halo of rays and a wreath of green leaves that curves around the bottom of the design. The bold black outlines, flat red and green fills and soft shading on the skin show a classic traditional style, and the ink is mixed colour with black linework.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had held the tiller of the Constance Mae for three hours before the lock at Hythe Bridge, and in all that time she had not once looked at the wheelhouse door. Her father had painted the girl there the spring he bought the boat, a pin-up in a white sailor's cap with hair cut short as a blackbird's wing, and the red of her dress had faded to the colour of old brick.

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Mr Dobbs leaned on the lock gate and called down that the water was low and the barge would scrape the sill if she carried her load. Nell shouted back that she had scraped worse. He laughed, because everyone on the Ouse knew her father had said the same thing for thirty years, and that was the trouble with inheriting a boat: it came with his opinions.

She brought the Mae in against the bank and went below for the anchor chest. Under the coils of rope was a tin biscuit box, and inside it a folded chart of the river with pencil marks where her father had sounded the shallows, and a letter in a hand she did not recognise, addressed to him care of a pub in Goole. It was dated the summer she was born. The writer thanked him for the laurel she had sent back with the boat's last cargo and asked him to keep the girl on the door sailing.

Nell climbed back up, dropped the anchor into the lock pool and watched the chain run out until it sang. Then she wiped the paint dust from the girl's painted cheek with her thumb, picked up the pole, and took the Mae through the gates on the next rise of water.

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